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Bordering On Dishonesty: Mitt Romney On Bain, Barack And Jobs

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Mr. Romney’s claims about the Obama job record aren’t literally false, but they are deeply misleading. Still, the real fun comes when we look at what Mr. Romney says about himself. Where does that claim of creating 100,000 jobs come from?

Well, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post got an answer from the Romney campaign. It’s the sum of job gains at three companies that Mr. Romney “helped to start or grow”: Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Mr. Kessler immediately pointed out two problems with this tally. It’s “based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain,” and it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.” Either problem, by itself, makes nonsense of the whole claim.

On the point about using current employment, consider Staples, which has more than twice as many stores now as it did back in 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain. Can he claim credit for everything good that has happened to the company in the past 12 years? In particular, can he claim credit for the company’s successful shift from focusing on price to focusing on customer service (“That was easy”), which took place long after he had left the business world?

Then there’s the bit about looking only at Bain-connected companies that added jobs, ignoring those that reduced their work forces or went out of business. Hey, if pluses count but minuses don’t, everyone who spends a day playing the slot machines comes out way ahead!

In any case, it makes no sense to look at changes in one company’s work force and say that this measures job creation for America as a whole.

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, Jobs | , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Missing “Leveling Experience”: Dull Mitt Romney Needs A “Groping” Scandal

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is so dull that  he could benefit from an eye-popping scandal because it would help tear  down his plastic image and make him look more normal, according to  national pollster John Zogby.

“This is the one instance  where a groping incident could help a candidate,” said Zogby, in a  reference to the scandal that torpedoed former GOP candidate Herman  Cain’s campaign.

He said it could be the missing “leveling  experience” for Romney that would make him look more human. Zogby  explained that many stiff, rich men have run for office and won, but  they typically had a humbling moment that made them more likeable. He  gave former President George W. Bush’s alcoholism as an example of that  leveling experience.

“His problem is an authenticity  problem,” said Zogby of Romney, who today released his New Hampshire  tracking poll that has Romney far in front. “He’s the kid who never  colored outside the lines,” said the pollster.

Zogby said  Romney needs to find a way to connect with an unethusiastic party that  wants to vote with its brain and heart. But, he warned, he shouldn’t try  to do that with a policy speech or new position. “Likability,” he said,  “is a lot more than an issue.”

He echoed charges from  competing campaigns and President   Obama’s advisor David Axelrod that Romney’s 25 percent finish in  the Iowa caucuses was an example of how he’s failed to expand his  personal base of voters from the amount he received in the 2008  caucuses.

Romney, Zogby said, spent “a lot of time, money  and energy to get where he was already.”

 

By: Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Rick Santorum Is Coming For Your Birth Control

Here is an actual Rick Santorum quote: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

These comments were not dug up from some bygone moment of ideological purity, before dreams of a presidential campaign. He said them in October, to a blogger at CaffeinatedThoughts.com (they met at Des Moines’ Baby Boomers Cafe).

It’s pretty basic: Rick Santorum is coming for your contraception. Any and all of it. And while he may not be alone in his opposition to non-procreative sex, he is certainly the most honest about it — as he himself acknowledged in the interview.

This is important, because while reproductive rights are always cast in terms of pro or against a woman’s right to an abortion and in what circumstances, even liberals are surprised to find out what social conservatives really want to do about contraception. Liberals are even willing to cast the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood and all Title X programs (a position that has become mainstream in Republican circles) as an abortion issue, when it is actually about contraception. (The Hyde Amendment already bans almost all federal abortion funding.) So is this about “babies” or is this about sex? Rick Santorum isn’t even pretending it’s (only) about childbearing.

Speaking to ABC News’ Jake Tapper, Santorum recently reaffirmed his opposition to Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that struck down a ban on discussing or providing contraception to married couples, and established a right to privacy that would later be integral to Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. (It is generally better-known how Santorum feels about gay people.) That would be the case where the majority asked, “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” Rick Santorum disagrees. He thinks, using the currently popular states’ rights parlance, that “the state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.” This is a view Santorum has held at least since 2003.

The trouble with this is that not only have more than 99 percent of sexually active women used at least one form of birth control, helping people get access to birth control is actually a popular issue. According to a June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 82 percent of Americans actually want to expand access to birth control for women who cannot afford it, while only 16 percent were opposed.

Santorum isn’t alone. Five of the current or former Republican presidential candidates signed the Personhood Pledge (though unlike Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul added some caveats to their support). Mitt Romney told Mike Huckabee he’d support an amendment saying life begins at conception — which Personhood folks interpret as the fertilization of an egg, meaning that contraceptives like the IUD and sometimes even the pill are murderous. (Good luck figuring out what Romney actually thinks on that one.)

Santorum just happens to be happiest putting it at the top of the agenda. In the Caffeinated Thoughts video, he promises that “all those issues are going to be front and center with me,” and says, ”I know most presidents don’t talk about these things and maybe people don’t want us to talk about these things. But I think it’s important that you are who you are… these are important public policy issues.” Among those important public policy issues: Sex for fun. In the same video, Santorum bemoans sex becoming “deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”

Many people don’t want them to talk about these things because it shows the true colors of what social conservatives wish for this country, which is very different from what Americans wish for themselves. Maybe the near-win in Iowa yesterday is the end of the road for Santorum, and maybe no one will ever succeed by openly suggesting a contraception ban that would send the condom police into America’s bedrooms. But that’s clearly the world Santorum wants, and it’s one that is entirely consistent with the antiabortion movement’s goals. That would be the same movement that over the past year decided it had a mandate in states across the country, the same one that demanded endless obeisance from the Republican candidates in Iowa this year — and mostly got it.

 

By: Irin Carmon, Salon, January 4, 2012

 

 

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Abortion, GOP Presidential Candidates, Pro-Choice | , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Did Santorum Win Iowa?: Caucus Vote Counter Says Typo Gave Mitt Romney 20 Extra Votes

An Iowa GOP caucus voter who helped count the votes at his small caucus meeting in Moulton, Iowa claims that former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) accidentally received 20 extra votes than he earned — a claim which, if true, would change the winner of the unusually close caucus to former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA):

Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.

“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.”

True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party’s website, True’s precinct cast 22 votes for Romney.

Des Moines TV station KCCI 8 captured an image of Moulton’s handwritten vote count:

Minor counting errors such as this one are extremely common on election day, so it is perfectly plausible that Moulton is correct and Romney did receive 20 unearned votes. It is equally plausible, however, that these lost votes could be canceled out by a similar error at another caucus site. The tentative results, which showed Romney with the barest 8 vote lead, have not yet been certified.

Nevertheless, the Iowa GOP does not seem happy that True is questioning the early result. According to KCCI, a spokesperson for the Iowa GOP said that “True is not a precinct captain and he’s not a county chairperson so he has no business talking about election results.”

 

By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, January 5, 2011

 

January 6, 2012 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Iowa Caucuses | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Champion Of The Already Powerful: Mitt Romney’s Brand Of Extremism

Mitt Romney’s close call at the Iowa caucuses Tuesday will doubtless contribute to speculation that he is too “moderate” to appeal to Republican primary voters. While Romney has a complicated relationship with his new party-line stances on social issues, I’d argue that his new positions and his Olympian flip flops that he had to make to get there are only part of his problem. Romney isn’t too moderate for Republican voters — at this time in our country he’s simply the wrong kind of extreme.

The 2012 election will ultimately be a referendum on the kind of economic policies Americans want — ones that work for working people or ones that are designed by and for a privileged few. The Bush-instigated recession has compounded the unprecedented disparity between the richest few Americans and the millions who are struggling just to get by. President Obama’s efforts to put Americans back to work have been met at every turn by a Republican Congress unwilling to stimulate the nation’s economy and stabilize the nation’s finances, inexplicably eager to give a tax hike to working families but unwilling to let Bush’s damaging tax cuts for the wealthy expire. All the Republican frontrunners are offering similar reprises of Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But only one comes across immediately and undeniably as an extreme corporatist.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hit Romney’s extremism problem on the head when he said the candidate “looks like the guy who fired you.” Most didn’t get to see his face at the time, but Mitt Romney has plenty of experience firing people from a distance, sending thousands of jobs overseas while raking in fat paychecks at Bain Capital that continue today years after his retirement. No wonder he hasn’t been able to shake the image of himself as a corporate fat-cat: he doesn’t just want to give corporations and the wealthy major tax cuts, he openly states that he thinks “corporations are people.”

And Romney’s out-of-touch image and pro-corporate extremism aren’t just turn-offs to progressives. A poll by The Hill this fall found that “55 percent of conservatives and 81 percent of centrists” see income inequality in America as a problem. A Bloomberg–Washington Post poll found that a majority of Republicans think the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes to help bring down the budget deficit. Corporate extremism at odds with the priorities of the base is the norm among the GOP presidential candidates — but only Romney embodies it.

Unfortunately, Romney’s near-miss with Santorum will help him frame himself a mainstream, electable candidate just conservative enough to make it through the Republican primary gauntlet. Santorum is the perfect foil: a right-wing ideologue so extreme he thinks states should be able to outlaw contraception, that homosexuality is akin to bestiality, that high obesity rates are an argument against food stamps, and that all married same-sex couples should have their unions annulled. But when it comes to policy, Romney’s positions on social issues are nearly indistinguishable from those of his crusading opponent. Romney has endorsed radical anti-choice “personhood amendments.” He rejects marriage equality and says he wouldn’t support a federal-level Employment Non-Discrimination Act. He opposes the DREAM Act. He’s even getting his legal policy advice from Robert Bork, a right-wing crusader so extreme the Senate wouldn’t confirm him to the Supreme Court.

Romney and Santorum would each be disastrous to America on both social and economic issues. But their near-tie in Iowa exposes a fault line that will be visible through the general election. So what’s the difference? While there is still a solid evangelical base that embraces the kind of social extremism offered by Santorum, American voters across the political spectrum are wary of the government-by-the-few embraced by the GOP and embodied by Romney.

Santorum is no less of an economic extremist than Romney, just as Romney is hardly less of a social extremist than Santorum. Every Republican candidate has called for trillions of dollars of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, for ending Medicare as we know it, and for a return to George W. Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But Romney — through his biography, demeanor and tin ear — has, with good reason, become personally associated with these policies that cater to the wealthy and privileged and ignore the middle class.

The 2012 election will come down to a very basic choice. Do we want a champion of the middle class in the White House or the champion of those who are already powerful? Do you want to hire the guy who fired you? Iowa Republicans this week started answering that question.

 

By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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