Why Mitt Romney’s Opportunity Tack Won’t Work
So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity. He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.
Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.
But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”
And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”
So Republicans know that Americans like much of the spending that government does. And yet, like the true believers that they are, they really end up spending more of their time persuading themselves that the public agrees with them. And they do this because they genuinely believe that on some basic level they are real and good and patriotic Americans while liberals and Democrats are fake and bad and weak Americans. This is a core conviction, and it has a corollary: that we (the Republicans) represent and speak to middle America, while the Democrats represent and speak to Cambridge and Berkeley, and surely what we have to say about these matters resonates deeply in flyover country.
It’s just not nearly as true as Republicans persuade themselves it is. Middle-of-the-road voters in Iowa aren’t any more right wing than they are left wing. A tautological sentence, perhaps, but one that nevertheless needs to be repeated and understood. Republicans always assume America is behind them: on removing the reprobate Bill Clinton from office, on wanting to dismantle Medicare and Social Security, on sharing various paranoid and absurd convictions about who Barack Obama is, Republicans enter the fray certain that Middle America will agree with them. But then Middle America does not. They really liked Clinton and recognized what was going in 1998 as a time-wasting witch hunt, they love their Social Security and Medicare, and they elected Obama over a genuine war hero by (for such an evenly divided country) a pretty massive margin.
So back we come to Romney. His chosen words are pretty good. But this isn’t the mid-1980s. Majorities of average Americans no longer think the Democratic Party is in essence stealing from them. And majorities of average Americans pretty much like Obama personally. If they didn’t, his approval rating would have dipped down into the 30s when unemployment was north of 10 percent. It never did. Most Americans are pulling for the guy. Another fact that drives wingers nuts, and that I chuckle about at least four or five times a week.
Romney has been drinking tea-infused water for months now, trying to appease those to his right. I’m sure he thinks that at the same time, he’s talking sense to the rest of America. But the rest of America isn’t as intoxicated by those hairy-chested nostrums about self-reliance as conservatives think they are.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 27, 2011
“Bain Capitalist”: Mitt Romney Haunted By His Victims
During Mitt Romney’s Senate campaign 17 years ago, the Republican politician was faring quite well against Ted Kennedy, right up until voters started hearing from some of Romney’s victims.
To briefly review, Romney got very rich running a private-equity firm, Bain Capital, which broke up companies and laid off American workers. He had considerable success orchestrating leveraged buyouts, seeking taxpayer subsidies, flipping companies quickly for large profits, and making money for investors, even when the employees of those companies were deemed collateral damage.
In the 1994 campaign, this mattered. Many of Romney’s victims drove to Massachusetts to protest the Republican’s campaign, and Democrats put together a half-dozen ads featuring laid-off workers who said they suffered while Romney lined his pockets at their expense.
It proved effective in 1994, and Dems hope it will work again in 2012.
A former employee of Bain Capital, GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney’s former company, said Sunday that Romney’s decisions cost him and many others their jobs.
Randy Johnson said Sunday that the former Massachusetts governor’s decisions as Bain’s CEO put him out of work.
Romney was the chief executive officer of Bain Capital in 1992 when the company purchased American Pad & Paper, or Ampad, and oversaw the management of that company and others.
Ampad went bankrupt in 2000, and investors netted over $100 million from the deal, according to the Boston Globe.
Johnson told reporters yesterday, “I really feel that he didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people.”
For its part, the Romney campaign recently began arguing that critics of Bain Capital’s layoffs are borderline communists, trying to “put free enterprise on trial.”
Between this and Romney’s agenda — take away health care coverage from millions, tax breaks for the wealthy, free reign for Wall Street, more foreclosures — the “man of the people” routine may prove to be a tough sell.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 2, 2011
Battered In Iowa, Gingrich Plans To Rip Romney In New Hampshire And Beyond
The morning after the Des Moines Register‘s final Iowa pre-caucus poll put Newt Gingrich in fourth place and falling, the former Speaker of the House attended mass at St Ambrose Church in Des Moines and then rode thirty-five miles due north in his bus to Ames for an event at the West Towne Pub. The event was billed as a meet-and-greet with voters, but in truth it was more of a full-blown media clusterfuck: the ratio of reporters/pundits/TV personalities (David Gregory, David Brooks, and the inestimable Al Hunt were all in the house) and photographers/cameramen to actual Iowans was roughly ten-to-one. As Gingrich and his wife, Callista, made their way slowly through the jampacked bar, he seemed giddy and slightly gobsmacked by the extent and intensity of the attention. “I’ve never seen so many reporters in my life,” Gingrich marveled. “Don’t you all have anything else to do?”
A fair question, to be sure, especially in light of Gingrich’s standing in the race. One explanation is that his schedule—unlike that of his rivals, all of whom were farther afield today—took him to venues within easy driving distance of Des Moines, which is ground zero for the lazy (or, in the case of Impolitic, skull-splittingly hung over) schlubs who constitute the campaign hack pack. But two other explanations also account for the media scrum. The first is that Gingrich’s unpredictability raises the potential payoff of trailing him around. And the second is the sense among many in the press and the political class that, despite the stunning collapse he has suffered in Iowa, Gingrich may still have the best (and possibly the only) chance of tripping up Romney in what is looking increasingly like a waltz to the Republican nomination.
First a word about that collapse, which has been apparent for two weeks and the Register‘s poll confirmed. As recently as the second week of December, Gingrich was in first place in Iowa, polling north of 30 percent. Today, the stats gurus for the local broadsheet—who have historically produced the most reliable caucus surveys—find his support just barely in double digits (12 percent over a four-day sampling last week, 11 over the last two of those days). The Register also found Romney in first place, with 24 percent; Ron Paul in second with 22 and Rick Santorum in third with 15 (though if you only count those most recent two days of sampling, their positions are reversed, with Paul fading to third with 18 percent and Santorum surging to second with 21); and Rick Perry flatlining in fifth with 11.
The cause of Gingrich’s downward spiral is clear enough: the relentlessly brutal and brutally relentless negative-ad barrage inflicted on him in Iowa since his surge in late November and early December. Indeed, something like half of the vast number of spots that have run here in that time frame have been assaults on Gingrich. The primary source of those spots has been the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, which has spent something like $3.5 million on the effort. Gingrich has done nothing to disguise his ire at this turn of events; as the MSNBC host Alex Wagner has described his recent countenance, “The Teddy Bear is angry.”
What the Teddy Bear has not done, however, is fight back—not in any effective way, at least. But at Gingrich’s second event of the day—another meet-and-greet at another sports bar, this time in Marshalltown—he indicated that his passivity is about to disappear. After chatting and taking pictures with voters for about an hour, the candidate decided to conduct an unscheduled media availability. Among those present was another MSNBC host, Chris Matthews, who more or less took control of the proceedings, goading Gingrich by suggesting that he had let Romney’s super-PAC “kick the shit” out of him.
More than any other candidate in the race—more than most politicians, period—Gingrich is perfectly happy to address process questions, adopting the mien of a hardened political consultant. Comparing himself implicitly to John Kerry, Gingrich complained that he had been “Romney-boated” by the negative ads. “I probably should have responded faster and more aggressively,’’ he admitted. “If somebody spent $3.5 million lying about you, you have some obligation to come back and set the record straight.”
Then Gingrich went on, incredibly, to lay out his post-Iowa strategy. “New Hampshire is the perfect state to have a debate over Romneycare and to have a debate about tax-paid abortions, which he signed, and to have a debate about putting Planned Parenthood on a government board, which he signed, and to have a debate about appointing liberal judges, which he did,” Gingrich said. “And so I think New Hampshire is a good place to start the debate for South Carolina.”
So there you have it: Gingrich, who trails Romney badly in the Granite State, plans to use the week between the caucuses here and the primary there to rip Romney a new one; and in doing so, weaken him in South Carolina, where Gingrich (for the moment) is polling strongly and is at the head of the pack. Now flush with a decent fundraising haul in the last quarter of 2011—around $9 million, he claims—Gingrich apparently intends to take to the airwaves to make his case, in addition to hammering Romney as a dreaded (and self-described, albeit long ago) moderate in the two debates scheduled for this weekend in New Hampshire.
There is, no doubt, something deeply ironic (or even wildly hypocritical) about this putative strategy being outlined by a guy who continues to insist that he is waging a “relentlessly positive” campaign, and who says that he is pinning his hopes of exceeding expectations in Iowa on the possibility that voters here will rise up and repudiate the Romney camp’s negativity towards him. But in politics, consistency is the hobgoblin of … well, almost no one, and least of all Newton Leroy Gingrich.
The more salient and remarkable fact, however, is that Romney has somehow managed to have been the GOP’s de facto frontrunner through all of 2011 and yet never faced sustained negative attacks from his any of his rivals. Romney has improved as a candidate in many ways, but on this score, he has simply been lucky. Barring some strange twist, that luck may be enough to help him win a victory in Iowa on Tuesday night that was barely thinkable a few months back. But if the Angry Teddy Bear has his way, Romney’s luck—at least on this front—is about to reach its end.
By: Published in Daily Intel, January 1, 2012
Iowa Caucuses Are As Distorted As A Funhouse Mirror
When the Iowa caucus results trickle in Tuesday night, the usual rules of mathematics may be suspended.
In normal elections, the candidate who garners the most votes is the undisputed winner. But the caucuses are anything but normal.
Instead, the raw totals will be put through a Cuisinart of spin and obfuscation as the campaigns, the operatives, and the pundits try to whip up their desired electoral concoction.
All this unfolds against the backdrop of an expectations game that isn’t unlike the Wall Street casino, where beating the analysts’ consensus each quarter is more important than earnings per share.
Take Mitt Romney, surely the most maligned front-runner of modern times. The former governor spent the year fostering the notion that he wasn’t really playing in Iowa, where he got trounced in 2008, but had to abandon that charade when Newt Gingrich started coming on strong. That’s why Romney spent New Year’s weekend racing through the cornfields.
If Romney prevails at the caucuses, he is the undisputed winner, gets a slingshot into New Hampshire, the quasi-home state where he’s already favored, and could all but wrap this thing up within a week.
But if Romney finishes second, he could still be declared the winner—that is, if Ron Paul finishes first. The logic is that nobody outside the congressman’s inner circle sees him as a serious threat to win the Republican nomination. So a Paul victory will be immediately discounted by the press as a fluke—but good news for Romney because it prevents a more viable rival such as Gingrich from getting an Iowa bounce. Paul, meanwhile, loses by winning. Got that?
Rick Santorum was virtually ignored by the media until he blipped up to 15 or 16 percent in three polls last week and triggered the promiscuous use of the S-word, surge. Suddenly he was everywhere, including the Today show. If Santorum finishes third, he will be crowned a winner simply because he had been so far back in the pack.
For Newt, the situation is reversed. Six weeks ago, the media would have treated word that he might place third in the caucuses as a stunning comeback, given that the former speaker was widely written off after his campaign imploded last summer. Then Gingrich rocketed into first place in the polls and expectations soared; he might actually win Iowa! Romney would be mortally wounded! Uh, not so fast. That was before a super PAC with close ties to Romney unleashed a barrage of nearly $3 million in anti-Newt attack ads, which amounted to nearly half of all political commercials aired in the Hawkeye State.
Suddenly, Gingrich was saying he’d be happy to finish in the top four, and his campaign manager said fifth place would be just fine—not a particularly effective attempt to move the goalposts. If Gingrich does somehow make it to the top three, he can do a victory dance.
(Think this stuff doesn’t matter? Bill Clinton effectively won the 1992 New Hampshire primary by declaring himself the “Comeback Kid,” even though he finished second, because he clawed his way back from womanizing and draft-dodging allegations. But the trick got old. When Joe Lieberman in 2004 exulted over being in “a three-way split decision for third place,” despite being mired in single digits in New Hampshire, everyone scoffed.)
Finishing out of the “top tier,” as defined by the media-politico complex, would be bad news for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, both of whom briefly led the Iowa polls. Every time they turn around, reporters will be asking whether they plan to drop out. In such an environment, fundraising tends to dry up, a vicious cycle that forces most candidates to the sidelines.
To underscore the absurdity of the process further, 119,000 Republicans turned out four years ago, so these distinctions about who grabbed a ticket out of Iowa and who didn’t often turn on one candidate pulling a thousand votes more than the next one. And these aren’t just ordinary voters, but people willing to sit through a community meeting at 7 p.m. on a cold January night. What’s more, no delegates are awarded on caucus night, which simply starts a long and complicated process.
Why, then, does Iowa—a state far whiter and more rural than most of America—get to play such an outsize role? Well, it performs more of a winnowing function in GOP contests, where the evangelical vote can be as high as 40 percent. Mike Huckabee went nowhere after winning the caucuses in 2008, while John McCain, who finished fourth, wound up as the nominee. Iowa is in some ways a funhouse mirror, distorting the process as everyone else suspends disbelief and plays along.
State officials, such as Gov. Terry Branstad, tell me Iowa deserves its kickoff spot because the well-informed citizenry peppers the candidates with tough questions. But even they had to admit there was far less of that this year, when the candidates spent much of their time in TV studios and at network-sponsored debates rather than pressing the flesh in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.
If Santorum finishes strongly—and he’s largely escaped media scrutiny because his rise began in the final week—it will partially vindicate the old-fashioned shoe-leather approach. He conducted more than 300 events in the state. Now he’s talking about making a stand in New Hampshire, knowing full well the way the press scores these things. “We just have to exceed expectations, which right now are pretty low,” Santorum told Politico.
But that in turn depends on whether Santorum’s Iowa vote is deemed better than expected, worse than expected, or somewhere in the muddled middle. Within a day or two the press will be obsessing about New Hampshire, and except for those left behind as roadkill, Iowa may well prove not to have mattered very much.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, January 2, 2012
New Year’s Resolutions: New Rules For The New Year
NEW YEAR’S resolutions are the original New Rules. Except that resolutions are usually self-oriented: I am going to lose weight this year. My New Year’s resolution, by the way, is to do the ones from ’75; I made a lot of good ones that year. I was 19, and thought I could polish them off by age 20. Alas, I’m a little behind.
Also, New Rules are bigger, broader and grander. I don’t tell you what I’m going to eat; I tell you how the world should work. Here’s what 2011 prompts me to decree for 2012:
New Rule Now that we have no money, and all our soldiers have come home from Iraq and they’ve all got experience building infrastructure, and no jobs … we must immediately solve all of our problems by declaring war on the United States.
New Rule If you were a Republican in 2011, and you liked Donald Trump, and then you liked Michele Bachmann, and then you liked Rick Perry, and then you liked Herman Cain, and then you liked Newt Gingrich … you can still hate Mitt Romney, but you can’t say it’s because he’s always changing his mind.
New Rule Starting next year, any politician caught in a scandal can’t go before the press, offer a lame excuse and then say, “Period. End of Story.” Here’s how you indicate a “period” and the end of a story: shut up.
New Rule The press must stop saying that each debate is “make or break” for Rick Perry and call them what they really are: “break.”
New Rule You can’t be against same-sex marriage and for Newt Gingrich. No man has ever loved another man as much as Newt Gingrich loves Newt Gingrich.
New Rule Internet headlines have to be more like newspaper headlines. That means they have to tell me something instead of just tricking me into clicking on them. If you write the headline, “She Wore That?” you have to go to your journalism school and give your degree back.
New Rule Let’s stop scheduling the presidential election in the same year as the Summer Olympics. I get so exhausted watching those robotic, emotionally stunted, artificial-looking creatures with no real lives striving to do the one thing they’re trained to do that I barely have energy left to watch the Olympics.
New Rule No more holiday-themed movies with a cast of thousands unless at least half of them get killed by a natural disaster. Fair’s fair — if I have to watch Katherine Heigl and Zac Efron as singles who can’t find love, I also get to see them swallowed up by the earth.
New Rule Jon Huntsman must get a sex change. The only way he’s going to get any press coverage is by turning into a white woman and disappearing.
New Rule Starting this year, every appliance doesn’t need a clock on it. My stove, my dishwasher, my microwave, my VCR — all have clocks on them. If I really cared that much about what time it was (or what year it was), would I still have a VCR?
By: Bi Maher, Author of “The New Rules”, New York Times Opinion, December 30, 2011
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