“Meritocracy” Fantacy: America’s Unlevel Field
Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”
As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?
Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.
Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.
And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.
The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.
Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.
And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.
It’s no wonder, then, that Horatio Alger stories, tales of poor kids who make good, are much less common in reality than they are in legend — and much less common in America than they are in Canada or Europe. Which brings me back to those, like Mr. Romney, who claim to believe in equality of opportunity. Where is the evidence for that claim?
Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.
If Mr. Romney has come out for any of these things, I’ve missed it. And the Congressional wing of his party seems determined to make upward mobility even harder. For example, Republicans have tried to slash funds for the Women, Infants and Children program, which helps provide adequate nutrition to low-income mothers and their children; they have demanded cuts in Pell grants, which are designed to help lower-income students afford college.
And they have, of course, pledged to repeal a health reform that, for all its imperfections, would finally give Americans the guaranteed care that everyone else in the advanced world takes for granted.
So where is the evidence that Mr. Romney or his party actually believes in equal opportunity? Judging by their actions, they seem to prefer a society in which your station in life is largely determined by that of your parents — and in which the children of the very rich get to inherit their estates tax-free. Teddy Roosevelt would not have approved.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 8, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Money Problem
Mitt Romney is fast becoming the Scrooge McDuck of the 2012 presidential race.
In Disney’s version, McDuck is Donald Duck’s rich uncle, fond of diving into his money bin and swimming through his gold coins. Romney achieved much the same effect years ago when he posed with fellow Bain Capital executives for a photo showing paper money pouring from their pockets and mouths.
But as he stumps through New Hampshire en route to his probable victory Tuesday in the state’s GOP presidential primary, Romney’s riches are bringing him a wealth of trouble.
Speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event at a Radisson hotel here, he was discussing the value of shopping around for health insurance when he turned to the camera, and said, with perverse pleasure, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Thus did the likely Republican nominee film, pro bono, one of President Obama’s first reelection ads.
If this weren’t enough evidence that Romney represented the Plutocrat Progress Party, the first questioner confirmed it.
“In this historic election, we need to convince the masses that our vision as conservatives benefits them,” she said. “So my question is: How will you as the nominee get the minds of America behind you?”
At least she didn’t say “unwashed masses.”
Romney didn’t show any concern that the woman had spoken aloud from the plutocrats’ playbook. “That is the question of my campaign, of course,” he said.
Of course.
The candidate, who last year told a group of unemployed Floridians that “I’m also unemployed,” worried aloud on Sunday that “there were a couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip” when he worked in the consulting business – an enterprise that helped build his personal wealth to as much as $250 million.
Perhaps realizing that the pink-slip pronouncement was problematic, the owner of multiple homes and horses asserted on Monday that “I started off, actually, at the entry level, coming out of graduate school.”
Newly minted MBAs from Romney’s Harvard can count on making well into the six figures in their “entry-level” jobs at consulting firms.
The entry-level explanation didn’t advance far with Romney’s rivals.
Rick Perry, whose net worth is rather south of Romney’s, responded while touring a restaurant in South Carolina: “Now, I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips.”
And Newt Gingrich described Bain Capital as a “small group of rich people manipulating the lives of thousands of people and taking all the money.”
Gingrich, however, lives in a glass mansion on this one. He boasts about his $60,000-a-pop speeches and has taken to complaining about food-stamp recipients in his speeches here in New Hampshire.
By the time Romney arrived at his next event on Monday, he was clearly out of sorts. First, he mixed up his own offspring as he made the introductions: “My third son is Ben, who has been missing. He’s a doctor from Utah. He came in last night. Special applause.” After the applause, Romney revised: “What did I say? My third son is coming tonight. Ben is my fourth.”
Romney went on to attempt to explain the value of shopping around for health insurance – this time without mentioning the pleasure he gets from firing people. He likened it to auto insurance. “If you watch on TV, the little animal, little gecko? You see these guys competing hard for your business.”
In the audience, many of the 150 reporters looked at one another and smiled.
The candidate had already treated them to a wealth of blue-blooded phrases during the day, seasoning his speech to the Chamber of Commerce with phrases such as “net-net” and “if you’re in a C-corporation” and “get a pro forma together.”
Net-net, nothing says “common man” quite like “get a pro forma together.”
Romney was not done with his “firing” line, however. After his event, held in a metal fabricating plant, he returned to take questions from the unwashed masses of the news corps, including 35 TV cameras.
He said that his fondness for firing was limited to health-insurance providers, and that “people are going to take things out of context and make it something it is not.”
This from a man who recently released an ad appearing to show President Obama saying that “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” In fact, Obama, in the 2008 passage, was quoting an aide to John McCain.
And now Romney is complaining about being taken out of context? That’s rich.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 9, 2011
Would Mitt Romney’s “Competence” Really Fix Washington?
The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson offers measured praise to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign and its all-but-inevitable march to the 2012 presidential nomination.
Gerson concludes this way:
Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.
Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.
I’m not sure how Romney Competence is supposed to work in practice.
For starters, the basic instinct of conservative economic policy is that government should stay out of the way and let the Bain Capitals of the world work their creative-destructive magic. It seems to me you don’t need to have run Bain Capital in order to, as president, stay out of its way.
Maybe that’s too snarky.
Okay, then. Let’s agree that it’s not former Gov. Romney’s specific expertise as a business consultant that’s needed in Washington. What we need in a president, more generally, is someone with deeply-rooted experience as a manager or executive.
Fine.
If we’re talking about the day-to-day demands of running the government—a big, formidable, complex job—I agree.
But let’s picture President Romney, with his deep management experience, his love of data, his (as Gerson puts it) belief that the “real task of governing” is “making systems work.” Let’s picture management-systems-loving President Romney negotiating with Congress. I want to know how, exactly, does Romney Competence deal with a “system” that’s riven by ideology? How does he make that one “work”?
When it comes to budgeting and fiscal reform, there’s no lack of number-crunches and data-lovers in Washington.
Occasionally, some of them even formulate actual proposals for lawmakers’ consideration.
Why, the current president of the United States established a commission to come up with a plan to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability!
What came of it?
Nothing.
Was it a lack of competence that explains why President Obama let the Bowles-Simpson plan twist in the wind? And why the debt-ceiling and “supercommittee” negotiations tanked so ignominiously?
When Tea Partyers refuse any increases in government revenue—even if they’re generated via code simplification rather than individual rate hikes, and even when they’re accompanied by entitlement reform—are they incompetent?
Is it so-called competence that divides Republican Sen. Tom Coburn from Americans for Tax Reform activist Grover Norquist?
Or is it something else? (Hint: it begins with an “i” and ends with a “y”.)
I genuinely want to know what difference it would make to have Mitt Romney, rather than one of his rivals, in the room with Coburn and Norquist.
Is it competence that’s urgently needed—or courage?
Which occasions the question I’ve been asking all along: When has Mitt Romney ever displayed political courage?
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2012
The “Up In The Air” Candidate: Mitt Romney’s “I Like Being Able to Fire People” Problem
There’s a scene in the movie Up in the Air in which George Clooney’s character, a corporate hatchet man who flies around the country firing people on behalf of his merger masters, turns to his eager young apprentice and explains why he’s able to avoid romantic entanglements:
“You know that moment when you look into somebody’s eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?”
She answers, “Yes.”
And Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, replies with hollow certainty, “Right, well I don’t.”
Ladies and gentlemen, meet former Gov. Mitt Romney, the “Up in the Air” candidate. Romney’s Bain Capital was the living embodiment of the Up in the Air ethic: form an investment group, take over the businesses, and fire the workers to pay off the investors. The human wreckage that resulted was merely collateral damage.
On Monday, Mitt Romney strung together seven words that should never be connected by any candidate: “I like being able to fire people.” Romney was speaking about being able to fire people providing him services, but the quotation figures to haunt him long after its context has been forgotten.
That because of Romney’s long-term problem: the feeling among voters that in many cases, “I like being able to fire people” is exactly what he meant for the workaday folks at the companies Bain Capital picked clean.
As the New York Times put it in their editorial, “The Corporate Candidates,”
The problem with Mr. Romney’s pitch is the kind of businessman he was: specifically, a buyer of flailing companies who squeezed out the inefficiencies (often known as employees) and then sold or merged them for a hefty profit. More than a fifth of them later went bankrupt…This kind of leveraged capitalism…is one of the reasons for the growth in the income gap, tipping the wealth in the economy toward the people at the top.
One of these companies, as according to Reuters, was a steel mill in Kansas City that Bain took over in 1993 and went bankrupt in 2001, putting 750 people out of work. Reuters reports that Bain’s profits were $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees
Meanwhile, one of the people Bain helped put out of work,
Joe Soptic found a job as a school custodian. The $24,000 salary was roughly one-third of his former pay, and the health plan did not cover his wife, Ranae.
When Ranae started losing weight, “I tried to get her to the doctor and she wouldn’t go,” Soptic said. She ended up in the county hospital with pneumonia, where doctors discovered her advanced lung cancer. She died two weeks later.
Soptic was left with nearly $30,000 in medical bills. He drained a $12,000 savings account and the hospital wrote off the balance.
“I worked hard all my life and played by the rules, and they allowed this to happen,” Soptic said.
Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign has gleefully jumped on Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” stumble and turned it into a ringtone, since Perry’s towel-snapping days at A&M are never far behind him. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, bankrolled by (ironically) antilabor casino owner Sheldon Adelson, is running ads and infomercials in South Carolina hammering Romney over Bain. Copying Sen. Teddy Kennedy in ’94, Gingrich is relying on the laid-off workers to tell Romney’s story. And even former Gov. Jon Huntsman, the supposed nice guy in the campaign, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday that Romney has no “core”.
All of this is laying down an effective emotional narrative for the Obama re-election campaign. Voters, as any pollster can tell you, decide how they feel about a candidate and once they have there’s little you can do to change it. The question isn’t whether the Bain attacks have factual resonance, the question is whether they have emotional resonance.
Should Romney get the nomination—and odds are he will—the emotional belief that Mitt Romney is the empty, “Up in the Air” Candidate will be his undoing in November.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2012
“Classless Chris Christie”: There’s Just Nothing Admirable About A Bully
I don’t find much to like about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). Political reporters tend to adore the guy — I guess for some, the “loveable loudmouth” is an archetype with appeal — but I find his policy agenda misguided, his incessant whining about President Obama misguided, and his approach to governing deeply irresponsible.
But on a more personal level, I just wish the guy had a little more class. Torie Bosch had this piece today on Christie’s ugliness yesterday.
On Sunday, Jan. 8., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was speaking at a Romney for President rally in New Hampshire when he was interrupted by some female hecklers. It’s difficult to make out exactly what Christie’s critics were yelling, but it’s something to do with jobs going down. Ever the class act, Christie’s response: “You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart.” […]
The video … was uploaded to the New Jersey GOP’s YouTube account. They seem to think his remark about “going down” is a zinger, something to be proud of, rather than recognizing it as flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic. How would Christie have responded to male protesters saying the same thing? Probably not by changing the subject to what acts they perform in the bedroom.
This fits in, unfortunately, with a larger pattern. Christie has a habit of trying to shout down anyone who challenges him, and the governor and his staff tend to be only too pleased to record the incidents and promote them. The public is apparently supposed to be impressed by his outbursts.
There’s just nothing admirable about a bully.
For that matter, governors — and presidential campaign surrogates, for crying out loud — should have a little better sense than to think cheap oral-sex jokes targeted at women protestors are acceptable.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 9, 2012
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