Mitt, Grits And Grit: “He Knows How To Hold A Baby” Y’all
“I’m learning to say ‘y’all,’ and I like grits. Things, strange things are happening to me.”
Those are the words of Willard Mitt Romney campaigning in Pascagoula, Miss., this week.
Wow. Note to Mitt: As a Southerner, I’ve never known us to find caricature endearing. But welcome to the Deep South anyway, Mitt. I wonder if you’ve been introduced to one of my favorite Southern sayings: the backhanded “Bless your heart.”
By all accounts you’re going to need it. No one expects you to do well on Tuesday when Mississippi and Alabama hold their primaries.
(Kansas holds its caucuses on Saturday, and Rick Santorum is leading the polls there.)
When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi endorsed Romney on Thursday, he tried his best to humanize him, saying: “He just has a warm, comfortable way about him. I like to see a man when he’s holding a baby. And he looks like he’s held a baby before. Let me tell you, this man is connecting with the people of this nation, and it is about those simple things.” He knows how to hold a baby? Nice try, governor. Bless your heart.
According to Gallup, Mississippi is the most conservative state in the union, and Alabama clocks in at No. 4. Romney continues to struggle with more conservative voters. In the 2008 elections, 7 out of 10 Mississippi primary voters described themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. Romney has also struggled with that group.
Last Tuesday, in the primaries in the states of Oklahoma, Georgia and Tennessee, about 70 percent of voters said it was important that their candidate share their religious views. Romney won no more than a quarter of those voters in each state. Welcome to the Southern G.O.P. Bless your heart.
Some argue that this is inconsequential and that all Romney has to do is win the nomination and rank-and-file Republicans will fall in line. They even argue that his less-than-strident, often inconsistent, views may be an asset in a postnomination tack to the middle.
It is true that these states are in no danger of swinging Democratic. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t voted Democratic since 1976. And since Mississippi started holding primaries, no Republican candidate except the eventual presidential nominee has won the state, according to Catherine Morse, a University of Michigan government and political science librarian.
In fact, Obama lost both states to John McCain in 2008 by large margins, and the votes were largely along racial lines. In both states, 88 percent of whites voted for McCain, while 98 percent of blacks voted for Obama.
Obama will not win Mississippi and Alabama, period. But that’s not the issue. The issue is enthusiasm, which has a way of bleeding across borders and ideological boundaries.
In elections, enthusiasm has two sources: for your candidate or against the other. We know well that there is a high level of hostility toward Obama on the right, but he still maintains a number of liberal devotees. Although there are some on the left who have softened on him, he still has a wide swath of passionate supporters who seem to feel that he is moving in the right direction and deserves a chance to finish the work he has started. In fact, according to Gallup, at this point in the race, Democrats are more enthusiastic about Obama than Republicans are about Romney.
The elections will boil down to a duel between anger and optimism, and in general elections optimism wins. Energy wins. Vision wins.
If the message that emerges from the nominating process is that Republican voters lack confidence in their candidate, that is not a message that can be easily sold to swing voters. It’s hard to point to your candidate’s good qualities when you’re using your hands to hold your own nose.
If the Republican nominee can’t appeal to his own base, how can he expect to draw from the middle and the left?
This is the conservative conundrum.
The Republican Party had an opening as wide as the Gulf of Mexico to unseat President Obama, but it appears that it could close with a weak candidate. The president has been hammered by a sputtering economy and hemmed in by an intransigent Congress. All the Republicans needed was a presidential nominee who could capture their discontent on a gritty, granular level and put a positive, big-picture, forward-looking face on it.
Instead, they find themselves with a scraggly lot of scary characters, each with a handicap larger than the next. And the one who’s likely to win the nomination is the one whom the base has the biggest doubts about. He has the good looks of a president but not the guts of one. The only view that he has consistently held is that he wants to win. Everything else is negotiable.
He projects the slick feel of a man who’s trying to sell you something that you don’t want by telling you something that you don’t believe. People don’t trust and can’t fully endorse it, even the ones who deeply dislike the president. In fact, poll after poll finds that the longer the nomination fight drags on and the more people come to know Romney, the higher their unfavorable opinions of him climb.
Furthermore, postnomination pivots have become more difficult in a world driven by YouTube, social media and citizen activism, where prenomination politicking lives forever online in a candidate’s own voice (and often on video).
Unfortunately for Romney, grits don’t give you grit. Dabbling in dialectic speech won’t quench people’s thirst for straight talk. Being called warm and comfortable doesn’t remove the gut feeling that you are cold and rigid. There is something missing from the core of the man, and people can see straight through him.
That makes places like Mississippi a real litmus test — of Romney’s ability to convert his base by connecting with it. Mississippi is a world away from Massachusetts. It’s a ruby-red state and the heart of conservatism. Mississippi is where he has to sell himself.
Bless his heart, y’all.
By: Charles Blow. Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 9, 2012
“Insufficient Influence”: Mitt Romney’s “Ultrawealthy” Backer Wants Even More Political Control
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire who is one of the 400 richest people in America, argued that the ultrawealthy in this country don’t have enough influence over politics. Griffin went on to say that the ultrawealthy “have a duty” to step forward and save the U.S. from what he says is a drift toward Soviet-style state control of the economy:
Q. I’m going to come back to this. But I want to touch on two more areas first. What do you think in general about the influence of people with your means on the political process? You said shame on the politicians for listening to the CEOs. Do you think the ultrawealthy have an inordinate or inappropriate amount of influence on the political process?
A. I think they actually have an insufficient influence. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet. And so I hope that other individuals who have really enjoyed growing up in a country that believes in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and economic freedom is part of the pursuit of happiness – (I hope they realize) they have a duty now to step up and protect that. Not for themselves, but for their kids and for their grandchildren and for the person down the street that they don’t even know …
At this moment in time, these values are under attack. This belief that a larger government is what creates prosperity, that a larger government is what creates good (is wrong). We’ve seen that experiment. The Soviet Union collapsed. China has run away from its state-controlled system over the last 20 years and has pulled more people up from poverty by doing so than we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity. Why the U.S. is drifting toward a direction that has been the failed of experiment of the last century, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.
He also complained that this is a “very sad moment in [his] lifetime,” citing the now-familiar Republican charge that the Obama administration has “embraced class warfare.”
Griffin is the founder and CEO of Citadel Asset Management, a Chicago-based hedge fund. In recent years, has lavished some of his estimated $3 billion net worth on a wide variety of right-wing groups and Republican candidates.
He and his wife contributed $150,000 to the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future, joining nine other billionaires who contributed a total of $2.8 million to the group during the second half of last year. Griffin has also contributed the maximum allowable amount directly to Mitt Romney’s campaign, $550,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC, $1.5 million to the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, $560,000 to the Republican Governors Association, $38,300 to the Republican National Committee, $72,900 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the $5,000 maximum to Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s Prosperity PAC, and $4,000 to Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) Every Republican is Crucial PAC.
While Griffin has contributed to some Democratic candidates for federal office in the past (mostly those from his home state of Illinois or who sit on congressional committees overseeing taxation and the financial industry), over the two most recent election cycles he has given just $2,500 to one Democrat while contributing $55,300 to Republicans candidates, including Sens. Scott Brown (MA), Marco Rubio (FL), Dan Coats (IN), Pat Toomey (PA), and Mark Kirk (IL) and Reps. Ryan, Cantor, and Sean Duffy (WI).
Griffin said that ultrawealthy individuals like himself should “absolutely” be allowed to donate unlimited amounts to Super PACs and political campaigns, citing “rules that encourage transparency.” However, he added that he views actual transparency with “trepidation,” noting a successful campaign that progressives launched against Target after it made a post-Citizens United corporate contribution to a group supporting an extreme anti-gay Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota.
By” Josh Dorner, Think Progress, March 10, 2012
“The Politics Of Sex”: The Bad News Is Good News
There was one brief shining moment last week when Mitt Romney appeared to be saying something sensible about sex.
“The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there,” he told reporters.
This was the way Republicans used to talk, oh, about a millennium or so ago. The state legislators wore nice suits and worried about bonded indebtedness and blushed if you said “pelvis.” A woman’s private plumbing? Change the topic, for lord’s sake. Now some of them appear to think about women’s sex lives 24/7, and not in a cheerful, recreational manner.
And it turned out that Romney misspoke. He apparently didn’t realize that the subject he was proposing to steer clear of was a Republican plan to allow employers to refuse to provide health care coverage for contraception if they had moral objections to birth control.
He was definitely going there! Mittworld quickly issued a retraction making it clear that Romney totally supports the idea of getting into questions of contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman. Particularly when it comes to reducing health insurance coverage.
Really, what did you expect? If Romney couldn’t even take a clear stand on Rush Limbaugh’s Slutgate, why would he say anything that forthright unless it was a total error? This is why we can’t get the dog-on-the-car-roof story straightened out. The reporters have their hands full just figuring out Mitt’s position on the biggest controversy of the last month.
We’ve certainly come to a wild and crazy place when it comes to the politics of sex. Perhaps this would be a good time to invest in burqa futures. However, I like to look on the bright side, and I am beginning to think we may actually be turning a corner and actually getting closer to resolving everything.
All of this goes back to the anti-abortion movement, which was very successful for a long time, in large part because it managed to make it appear that the question was whether or not doctors should be allowed to cut up fetuses that were nearly viable outside the womb.
But now we’re fighting about whether poor women in Texas — where more than half the children are born to families whose incomes are low enough to qualify them for Medicaid coverage of the deliveries — should have access to family planning. As Pam Belluck and Emily Ramshaw reported in The Times this week, the right has taken its war against Planned Parenthood to the point where clinics, none of which performed abortions and some of which are not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, are being forced to close for lack of state funds.
Or about whether a woman seeking an abortion should be forced to let a doctor stick a device into her vagina to take pictures of the fetus. The more states attempt to pass these laws, the more people are going to be reminded that most abortions are performed within the first eight weeks of pregnancy, when the embryo in question is less than an inch-and-a-half long.
And the more we argue about contraception, the more people are going to notice that a great many of the folks who are opposed to abortion in general are also opposed to birth control. Some believe that sex, even within marriage, should never be divorced from the possibility of conception. Some believe that most forms of contraception are nothing but perpetual mini-abortions.
Most Americans aren’t in these boats. In fact, they are so completely not in the boats that very, very few Catholic priests attempt to force their parishioners to follow the church’s rules against contraceptives, even as the Catholic bishops are now attempting to torpedo the health care reform law on that very principle.
Every time a state considers a “personhood” amendment that would give a fertilized egg the standing of a human being, outlawing some forms of fertility treatment and common contraceptives, it reinforces the argument that the current abortion debate is actually about theology, not generally held national principles.
And, of course, every time we have one of those exciting discussions about the Limbaugh theory on making women who get health care coverage for contraception broadcast their sex lives on the Internet, the more the Republican Party loses votes, money, sympathy — you name it. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which last summer found women almost evenly divided on which party should control Congress, now shows that women favor Democrats, 51 percent to 36 percent.
The longer this goes on, the easier it will be to come up with a national consensus about whether women’s reproductive lives are fair game for government intrusion. And, when we do, the politicians will follow along. Instantly. Just watch Mitt Romney.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times Opinion Pages, March 9, 2012
“Leveraging Influence”: Why The Koch Brothers Want To Refine The Cato Institute
It seems that the effort by billionaires Charles and David Koch to take control of the libertarian Cato Institute is going poorly. “We are not acting in a partisan manner, we seek no ‘takeover’ and this is not a hostile action,” Charles Koch told Bloomberg News. When you are denying partisanship, takeover ambitions and hostile intentions in one sentence, you probably need to rethink your PR strategy.
The Koch brothers have long supported Cato, which they helped found in Washington in 1977. Recently, however, they have come to consider their creation politically unreliable. In a meeting with Robert Levy, the chairman of Cato’s board of directors, they expressed their intention to remake the institute into a party organ that would aid their effort to unseat President Obama. To do so, however, they need control of the board. They intend to get it by suing the widow of William Niskanen, a recently deceased board member, for control of Niskanen’s shares.
Whether they can pull off this coup is for the courts to decide. But the bigger question is: Why in the world would they want to?
In 2006, the first page of Cato’s annual report included an admiring quote from, well, me. “The libertarian Cato Institute is the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life,” I wrote.
I am not exactly a libertarian. I’m a technocrat. I believe in the government’s ability, and occasionally its responsibility, to help solve problems that the market can’t or won’t resolve on its own. I find much of Cato’s hard-line libertarianism — to the point of purging Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey, libertarians who explored making common cause with liberals on select issues — naive, callous and occasionally absurd. And yet, it’s among a handful of think tanks whose work I regularly read and trust.
That’s because Cato is, well, “the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life.” It advocates those principles when Democrats are in power, and when Republicans are in power. When I read Cato’s take on a policy question, I can trust that it is informed by more than partisan convenience. The same can’t be said for other think tanks in town.
The Heritage Foundation, for instance, is a conservative think tank that professes to pursue goals similar to Cato’s. Where Cato’s motto is “individual liberty, free markets, and peace,” Heritage’s mission is the advancement of “conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
In practice, however, whatever the Republican Party wants, so does Heritage. In 1989, Heritage helped develop the idea of universal health care delivered by the private sector through an individual mandate. In the early 1990s, it helped Senate Republicans build that concept into a legislative alternative to President Bill Clinton’s proposed reforms. In the early 2000s, Heritage worked with then-Governor Mitt Romney to implement the plan in Massachusetts. Then, when Obama won office and Democrats adopted Heritage’s idea, Heritage promptly fell into step with the Republican Party and turned ferociously against it.
Similarly, when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was developing his budget and needed a friendly think tank to run the numbers, he turned to the Heritage Foundation. And boy, it made those numbers sprint. Heritage’s analysis showed Ryan’s budget driving down the unemployment rate to 2.8 percent. When the mockery that ensued proved too much for the think tank to bear, it quietly replaced the analysis with another that didn’t include unemployment predictions.
On policy, I probably agree more frequently with the Heritage Foundation than with Cato. But I can’t trust Heritage. I trust Cato. I don’t agree with its health-care expert, Michael Cannon, who considers universal coverage an absurd and deleterious goal. But I take his analysis seriously, and his critiques have informed my thinking. I’m certainly more skeptical of single-payer programs than I would have been without having read his arguments.
Similarly, I never considered myself particularly concerned with executive power, but in his book “The Cult of the Presidency,” Cato Vice President Gene Healy convinced me that “we begin by looking to the president as the solution to all our problems, and we end up believing he’s the source of all our problems,” contributing directly to Washington’s dysfunction. That has grown into a recurring theme in my writing. This column, for example, bears Healy’s imprint at the top. (I pause here to note that Cato is literally giving away Healy’s book, and you should absolutely accept the offer.)
I never had very strong views on intellectual property, but Cato’s Julian Sanchez — who is a friend — has convinced me that our intellectual-property system has become a protection racket for incumbent firms and is an impediment to innovation.
The list could go on, but the point is this: The Koch brothers’ fortune is estimated at more than $60 billion, a couple of thousand times Cato’s annual operating budget. The brothers have started many advocacy organizations, many of which spend their time — and the Kochs’ money — trying to influence the next election. They could begin another such group, one dedicated to providing campaign-season ammunition, without noticing the expense.
What’s puzzling is why the Kochs started this campaign in the first place. It’s easy enough to see what they hoped to achieve: They would quietly take control of Cato and then leverage its credibility to help elect a Republican president. Unfortunately for them, the cries from inside Cato made the “quietly” part impossible. But it would have been impossible in any case: Cato’s credibility is derived from its independence; it wouldn’t last long separated from it.
What the Kochs have in Cato is an advocacy organization that matters in the years between elections, even when the brothers’ preferred candidate doesn’t win, even to people who don’t share their ideology. Cato is an organization that can have more than a marginal impact on elections. It can have a significant impact on policy and governance.
That’s a level of influence that even the Kochs can’t buy. When two of the right wing’s most influential funders don’t recognize that, it should cheer liberals immensely.
“Inextricably Linked”: Scott Brown’s Mitt Romney Problem
When Republican Scott Brown stunned the political world in 2010 by winning the Senate seat in Massachusetts that Democrat Edward M. Kennedy had held for 46 years, it was Mitt Romney, a former governor of the state, who introduced Brown at the victory party in Boston.
A few weeks later, still basking in the rock-star glow of that unexpected win, Brown returned the favor. He introduced Romney at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference as “one of the Republican Party’s bright lights” and “my very, very dear friend.”
But now, as the two men anticipate tough general-election battles in the fall, their paths are beginning to diverge. Brown, who will face a difficult reelection fight, probably against Harvard professor and former Obama administration official Elizabeth Warren, is working hard to define himself as a “Massachusetts moderate,” hoping to build support among Democrats in the deeply blue state.
Romney, meanwhile, has been working equally hard to escape that label, which his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination have used as a slur against him during the primary campaign.
The likely result is that Brown will be forced into a delicate dance in the coming months to distance himself from a political mentor and his state’s other most prominent Republican politician. It is a twist of irony unique to Massachusetts but one that could hold broad significance to the marquee race.
Recent polls show Brown leading Warren, who has drawn national support because of her outspoken warnings about the excesses of Wall Street. But the November contest is widely considered a tossup, and the electoral math is difficult for Brown.
In the small world of Republican Massachusetts politics, the links between the two campaigns are especially close. Gail Gitcho, Romney’s communications director, once served that role for Brown. Colin Reed, Brown’s chief spokesman, used to work for Romney.
Robert Maginn, chairman of the state Republican Party, who is responsible for helping to get Brown reelected and boosting Romney’s chances if he becomes the party’s presidential nominee, is a Romney ally and a former board member at Bain Capital, which Romney founded.
And both campaigns employ strategist Eric Fehrnstrom to craft essentially opposite messages for the candidates — helping Romney argue that he is a reliable conservative and Brown present himself as an independent centrist.
“It might be easier for Brown if one of these other candidates were the nominee,” said Todd Domke, a Massachusetts-based Republican strategist. “Then he’d just distance himself totally and run as an independent. But he can’t plausibly do that entirely from Romney. The links between them are inextricable.”
Fehrnstrom referred questions to Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett, who said that the campaigns’ overlap is “deep inside baseball” and that Massachusetts voters will support Brown’s moderate approach over what he said would be an overtly partisan turn by Warren.
“I don’t think voters care about the hired help,” he said of the shared consultants. “Massachusetts voters are very sophisticated, and they recognize that Scott Brown is an independent Republican and his own person.”
With movie-star good looks and an everyman image, Brown won the 2010 special election against Attorney General Martha Coakley, in part by rallying a small group of tea party activists behind his promise to oppose Democratic efforts to reform the health-care system.
Since his election, he has sometimes angered those core supporters with his willingness to cross party lines and vote with Democrats on key issues, an increasingly rare trait in Washington as moderates such as Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) prepare to depart.
Some observers say he will use those efforts to present himself to the Democratic state as a different kind of candidate than Romney.
“Scott Brown has to sell himself as very different from Mitt Romney,” said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. “He will have to convey that he’s one of the few people left in American politics who’s willing to cross party lines and be that moderate voice so missing in American politics right now.”
Brown was an early endorser of Romney’s presidential campaign. But a Romney victory in the Massachusetts Republican primary Tuesday was a forgone conclusion — he took more than 72 percent of the vote — which meant that Brown did not need stump for him in in the state in recent weeks.
With the Senate in session, Brown was in Washington on Tuesday and did not attend Romney’s Super Tuesday rally in Boston.
As many as 800,000 more residents are expected to vote in November than took part in the special election that Brown won. Many of them are Democrats who support Obama’s reelection.
To win, Brown probably would have to persuade several hundred thousand people who vote for Obama to cross party lines and support him for the Senate.
With those voters in mind, he is pitching his independence — in contrast to Romney, who has been trying to frame his tenure as Massachusetts governor as “severely conservative.”
“I don’t worry about the party line. I don’t get caught up in petty fights,” Brown told a crowd in Worcester in January as he began his reelection effort.
But in the face of an effort by Warren to nationalize the race, Brown may find it more difficult to distance himself from his fellow Massachusetts Republican than he would from a different nominee.
Warren — who will compete in a primary for the Democratic nomination in September, although no Democrat has mounted a serious challenge — will say that Democrats who support Obama should vote against Brown. Her argument is that a vote for Brown would help Republicans take over the Senate and thwart the president’s agenda — Brown and Romney are no different, she says.
Last week, for instance, her campaign highlighted Brown’s support for a controversial amendment in the Senate that would allow employers to avoid providing insurance coverage for contraception if they hold moral objections to it.
Democrats think that Warren, who helped create the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is the perfect messenger in a campaign that they think will revolve, nationally and in Massachusetts, around restoring a balance between the middle class and corporations and the wealthy. A well-known figure on the left, she is likely to receive support from Democrats nationwide, although Brown starts with a significantly larger campaign war chest than Warren.
“The easiest way to tie somebody to something is with their own words. Scott Brown’s endorsement of Mitt Romney, his long history, their shared staffers and advisers — there’s a close tie between these two guys,” said John Walsh, chairman of the state Democratic Party.
But there are some areas in which Brown could easily draw distinctions with the former governor: He supports abortion rights, favors stem-cell research and backed ending the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service members.
Enraging many conservatives, Brown supported the Dodd-Frank financial legislation, which all of the Republican presidential candidates have vowed to repeal.
And while Romney struggles to overcome a reputation as a stiff campaigner uncomfortable with his wealth, Brown has an appealing personal story of overcoming a hardscrabble childhood. He famously drives a pickup truck and wears a barn coat.
When Romney awkwardly told a group of voters in Michigan last week that his wife, Ann, drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” a spokesman for presidential rival Newt Gingrich invoked Brown’s name to mock the former Massachusetts governor.
“Just doesn’t have the same Scott Brown ring to it,” R.C. Hammond tweeted.
Some Massachusetts strategists said Brown’s plan to focus on state issues might be made easier, ironically, by the lack of a competitive presidential race in the state. Because Obama is expected to win Massachusetts easily, all the electoral excitement in the state will focus almost exclusively on the Senate contest.
“Massachusetts voters understand the presidential election is not in doubt in the state. The focus will be on the Senate,” said Rob Gray, a Boston-based Republican strategist who worked for Romney when he was governor. “It could be awkward, but Scott will do what he has to do to distance himself. And depending on the dynamics of the race, it may come to transpire that he does not have to distance himself that much.”
By: Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, March 8, 2012
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