“Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire”: Mitt Romney’s Bain Timeline Doesn’t Add Up
It turns out that the implications of David Corn’s explosive scoop about how Mitt Romney misrepresentedhis role in Bain’s investment in a medical-waste firm that disposed of aborted fetuses goes far beyond that specific investment. The short version of that story is that while Romney claimed publicly to have had no role in the investment because it took place after he started working on the Salt Lake Olympics, he actually had an active role in the investment, according to legal documents obtained by Corn.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and as Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald points out, if Romney lied about that investment, then he also appears to have lied in his official financial disclosure forms filed with the government.
Twice, first in 2007 during his earlier presidential bid and again this year, Romney filed personal disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics which explicitly state that Romney left Bain in early 1999. “Mr. Romney retired from Bain Capital on February 11, 1999 to head the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way,” his ethics filings from June state.
But as Corn’s report details, that timeline doesn’t add up. Romney personally signed documents after February of 1999 related to the human-waste disposal deal and SEC documents also indicate he was a key investor in the deal. Moreover, according to contemporaneous public reports from Bain and the Boston Herald, Romney did not sever all ties or management responsibilities when he assumed his job running the winter Olympics.
Bottom line: Romney’s story doesn’t compute, and given that the credibility of all the defenses he makes to Bain criticism depend on whether or not you take his word, he’s got a real problem developing—if the media is paying attention.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, July 2, 2012
“Tying Themselves Into Knots”: Romney Adviser Contradicts A GOP Talking Point
Some Republicans knew that nominating a governor who had signed a healthcare reform law with an individual insurance mandate would be a problem. It would muddy their anti-Obamacare message, they warned, even if Mitt Romney could claim that he supports mandates only at the state level. Well, their fears were well-founded.
Consider the gaffe made by Eric Fehrnstrom, a top Romney campaign adviser, on MSNBC Monday morning. As I reported on Sunday night, Republicans and conservatives have tried to make the best of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act by saying that if it is justified under Congress’s taxing power, then it must be a tax increase, and a massive one at that.
But Romney, who signed a law that, just like the ACA, imposes a penalty on individuals who don’t buy insurance, does not like to admit that he raised taxes. (That’s why, as governor of Massachusetts, he mostly sought to increase revenue through new and higher user fees, including preposterously cruel ones, such as imposing a $10 fee for a certificate of blindness.)
These conflicting lines got crossed when Ferhnstrom said, “The governor disagreed with the ruling of the Court, he agreed with the dissent that was written by Justice Scalia, that very clearly said that the mandate was not a tax. The governor believes what we put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty and he disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.” This flies in the face of claims by Congressional Republicans and conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh, who say that the ACA is a tax. Fehrnstrom is also contradicting his own candidate who admitted back in 2008 that the penalty for not buying insurance in Massachusetts is a kind of tax.
But Congressional Republican aides tell the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that they can continue to make this argument even as the Romney campaign says the opposite. He writes:
You’d think the fact that the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign has now confirmed that Obamacare’s mandate is not a tax would undercut the use of this talking point by GOP Congressional officials, right?
You’d be wrong. One senior Congressional aide tells me that Republicans will continue to describe it in those terms. And a second senior GOP Congressional aide emails that there is no contradiction here.…
The Romney campaign and Republican Congressional officials alike both agree with Scalia’s argument that the mandate is not a tax in the sense that claiming it is a tax makes it Constitutional, even as Republican officials continue to argue that the mandate is a tax in the sense that SCOTUS said it was in the course of upholding the law.
It’s a clever argument, and a sort of technically consistent. But, as Sargent’s Post colleague Rachel Weiner points out, “That line of attack is more easily maintained by Republicans who never imposed any such mandate.” It’s irritating to see the GOP paying so little political penalty for their complete flip-flop on the individual mandate, but it’s satisfying to see that by nominating Romney they will at least tie themselves into knots over it.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 2, 2012
“Completely Disingenous”: Can Romney Remain Absurd Until November?
If you will forgive yet another post on the implications of the Supreme Court’s ACA decision, it is important to understand that for all the “excitement” and “motivation” it may create among “base voters,” this development also makes every day on the campaign trail a tightrope for Mitt Romney. He was already going to have to navigate his way to November talking constantly about the economy and the federal budget even as he was stuck with economic and budget policies that would horrify swing voters if they were aware of them. And now there will be no escape from the subject of a national health reform initiative modeled on his own plan in a gubernatorial administration that now seems about a million years away from where he has landed ideologically in order to win his party’s presidential nomination.
National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh refers to Romney’s current positioning on health care as presenting an “Absurd Romney:”
The difficulty of Absurd Romney’s task is pointed up by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped Romney design his 2006 health insurance program in Massachusetts. He says that the then-governor used reasoning and language very similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts in arguing for the necessity of an individual mandate. While Roberts said that Congress did not have the right to mandate behavior, it did retain the right to “tax and spend,” including penalizing people for not buying health care.
“It’s a penalty for free riding on the system. That’s the way Gov. Romney talked about it,” says Gruber, who later became one of the key architects of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was modeled in part on the Romney law. “Justice Roberts used similar language today.” Back in the 2000s, when Gruber demonstrated to Romney with computer models that, absent an individual mandate, one-third of Massachusetts’ poorest and sickest would remain uninsured (and drive up costs for everyone), Romney jumped on the point, instantly converted, says Gruber. Romney went at the problem “like a management consultant or an engineer” with no ideological taint, even against the advice of his conservative political advisers, Gruber says. “They were concerned about the politics of universal health care. He argued them down.”
Today, says Gruber, Romney is being “completely disingenuous” in arguing against a law whose principles he once embraced. And somewhat absurd. Gruber says Romney’s suggestion that, as in Massachusetts when he was governor, states should be permitted to decide on their health care plans is also disingenuous. Massachusetts could devise its health care law only because it had access to a large amount of federal money, a $385 million Medicaid grant that it needed to use to extend care to the poor. “He says the states could do it but not the federal government. Well, actually the states can’t do it” because they don’t have the money, says Gruber. “What he should be saying is that he ‘ll give the states a trillion dollars to come up with their own plans, but he’s not going to do that.”
Now some readers will say Romney and most of his supporters don’t give a damn about consistency, logic, or avoiding the appearance of being Absurd, and will just brazen it out. That may be true. But the thing about lying all the time about who you are, what you’ve done, and what you intend to do is that it frequently causes even the most disciplined dissembler to screw up or at least fail to make sense to voters with even minimal discernment. That’s the risk Romney is going to have to take nearly every time he opens his mouth over the next four months.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 29, 2012
“Offshored And Outsourced”: Mitt Romney’s Bain problem
While the Supreme Court’s upholding of the health-care law was last week’s most important event in historical terms, it will not be the decisive event of the 2012 election. In the long run, polling in swing states suggesting that Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is hurting him could have larger implications for where this campaign will move.
It’s certainly true that had the court knocked down President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the defeat would have been woven into a narrative of ineffectual leadership and mistaken priorities. Instead, the president found vindication not only from the court’s liberals but also from Chief Justice John Roberts.
But precisely because the decision saved the president from disaster on health care, it only reinforced the importance of the economic argument Obama and Romney have been having for months. And here is where Romney’s Bain problem kicks in.
As Democrats, mostly from Washington and New York, debated the efficacy of attacks on Romney’s role in Bain, an entirely different conversation was being driven in the swing states, courtesy of ads broadcast by the Obama campaign and especially by Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama super PAC. The ads portray highly sympathetic workers who lost their jobs and companies that collapsed even as Bain’s principals made substantial profits.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week provided surprisingly dramatic evidence of how much these commercials are wounding Romney.
In the country as a whole, 23 percent said they viewed Romney more positively because of his experience “managing a firm that specializes in buying, restructuring and selling companies,” while 28 percent said this made them view Romney more negatively. But in this year’s 12 battleground states, many of which have gotten a heavy run of the anti-Bain ads, only 18 percent viewed Romney’s business experience positively; 33 percent viewed it negatively. Obama led Romney by three points nationally but by eight in the battlegrounds.
This is disturbing news for Romney, who hoped his business experience would be an unalloyed asset. The numbers also underscore voter resistance to the core conservative claim that job creation is primarily about rewarding wealthy investors and companies through further tax cuts and less regulation. Americans are not anti-business, but they are skeptical that everything that is good for corporations is also good for their employees, and for job creation itself.
The Bain ads have done double-duty, specifically undermining Romney but also serving as a parable for how aspects of the current financial system hurt workers and local communities. Profits and productivity can rise even as real wages stagnate or fall, and jobs can be offshored and outsourced. The Romney campaign’s response to a recent Washington Post story describing Bain’s record on outsourcing — the campaign sought to “differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring” — sounded more like bureaucratic gobbledygook than an effective answer. Obama picked up on the story immediately, calling Romney an “outsourcing pioneer.”
But can the Obama campaign turn the argument over Romney and Bain into a broader challenge to the Republican claim that the only thing government can do to spur job creation is to get out of the way? “Jobs” will remain the Romney battle cry for the rest of the campaign, but the success of the anti-Bain offensive points to an opportunity for Obama to engage in a kind of political jujitsu. He can argue that Romney’s primary interest is not in job creation at all but in low-tax and deregulatory policies he would favor whether the economy was soaring or flat.
In a recent talk at the Center for American Progress, Stefan Löfven, the new leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, outlined a way to turn the debate around, arguing that job creation worldwide should be the focus of center-left parties. New policies on job creation should also be concerned with the quality and conditions of the jobs, how quickly the unemployed can be moved to new work and how the unemployed are treated and assisted toward new opportunities.
Here are the questions voters should be encouraged to ask in 2012: Should government focus directly on innovative approaches to creating good jobs in a new economy? Or should it be relegated to a position of powerlessness in which its only option is to concede ever more benefits to those — including the financial wizards at Bain — who are already doing very well indeed?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 1, 2012
“Mitt Romney, The Godfather Of ObamaCare”: Wrong Argument, Wrong Candidate
Remember the line Rick Santorum took against Mitt Romney in March? The race for the Republican nomination was not quite over, and the former senator, referencing health care policy, told voters in Wisconsin, “Pick any other Republican in the country. [Romney] is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”
Yesterday’s developments help reinforce the fact that Santorum had a point.
Consider today’s Boston Herald. For those unfamiliar with the outlet, the Herald is an unabashedly conservative paper, which goes out of its way to boost Republican candidates. Its front page headline this morning reads: “For Romney, Obamacare Ruling’s Just What The Doctor Ordered.”
Contrary to conventional wisdom, an anti-tax backlash over the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision upholding Obamacare could propel Mitt Romney all the way to the Oval Office, national Republicans said…. President Obama had originally promised the overhaul wouldn’t tax the middle class, and Republicans quickly seized on the ruling to point out that is exactly what the law does.
“Chief Justice John Roberts has all but gift-wrapped the election for Republicans with this ruling,” said Keith Appell, a GOP consultant based in Washington, D.C. “Now every single Democrat will have to defend the largest tax increase in American history during a bad economy in an election year.”
As a matter of policy, this is deeply silly. The mandate remains a tax penalty that will only apply to free riders — about 1% of the population, according to the CBO, who can afford insurance but refuse to get it.
But even if we put this aside, there’s that nagging detail the Boston Herald and other Republicans keep overlooking: Mitt Romney’s health care law in Massachusetts, his crowning accomplishment in government, has an identical mandate and an identical tax penalty. If Obamacare’s mandate must be considered a tax increase, Romneycare’s mandate must also be considered a tax increase.
Indeed, we can make this even more explicit: Mitt Romney is the only public official in American history to approve and implement this specific tax increase.
The conservatives who rushed yesterday to fill Romney’s coffers are supporting the godfather of Obamacare — the guy who imposed this health care mandate (read: tax increase) before the president was even elected. It’s exactly why Santorum called him the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama,” and why in retrospect, Santorum had a point.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 29, 2012
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