Mitt Romney, The Quiet Extremist
At the last GOP presidential debate, Americans of all political persuasions were shocked when the audience loudly booed Stephen Hill, an openly gay soldier who sent in a video question from Iraq about the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We were even more shocked when it dawned on us that not a single candidate on stage was going to step up to defend Hill or even thank him for his service to the country. Rick Santorum, the only candidate to respond to Hill’s question, accused him of receiving “special privileges” for “sexual activity” and called the new policy that allows him to serve openly “tragic.” None of his fellow candidates contradicted him.
Similar scenes unfolded in earlier debates, when crowds cheered Texas’ record breaking number of executions and applauded the idea of an uninsured man dying of a treatable illness.
These reactions hopefully say little about the average GOP voter — most decent people of any party recoil at the idea of insulting an active servicemember or of a sick neighbor dying — but the candidates’ silence spoke volumes. Today’s Republican presidential candidates, even the supposed moderates, live in fear of crossing a small base that has developed an alternate view of reality and a dangerously skewed notion of liberty. Chief among these is Mitt Romney, who started his career as an East Coast moderate but now knows that extremists are the only thing that can keep him from the GOP nomination. The former moderate is now, paradoxically, the most beholden to the extremist fringe.
Romney is still trying to have it both ways — to retain what little is left of his “moderate” persona while cheerfully appeasing the most extreme elements of the corporate and religious Right. He is banking on being able to get through the primary with both of his personas intact. Unfortunately for him, it’s not working.
In fact, Romney’s eagerness to appease has placed him solidly in the far-right — and increasingly unpopular –Tea Party camp of the GOP.
Romney wears his pro-corporate politics with the pride of a Koch brother. He told an audience in Iowa recently that “corporations are people” — a bold statement, even for a multi-millionaire who made his fortune partly on the profits from outsourcing American jobs. And he hasn’t backed down from his claim — in fact, he keeps repeating it.
Romney may think that corporations are people, but he seems to think that they deserve more care and concern from the government than working, tax-paying, family-feeding citizens. His economic plan calls for the vast deregulation of financial markets, whose lack of constraints in the Bush era led to the catastrophic economic collapse from which we’re still digging our way out. In contrast with his policies as governor of Massachusetts, where he helped close a budget gap by eliminating $110 million in corporate tax loopholes, Romney has now signed a pledge rejecting all efforts to raise revenues by making the wealthiest pay their fair share in income tax or closing loopholes that help companies ship jobs overseas. Instead, he has called for reducing corporate income tax, which is already so low and riddled with loopholes that some mammoth companies didn’t pay any last year. When a debate moderator asked the GOP candidates if they would accept a budget compromise that included $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases, Romney joined all the others in saying he would reject it.
It’s perhaps not unexpected that Romney has joined the Tea Party herd on fiscal policy — after all, he’s a wealthy man himself and stands to lose a little if Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy and other hand-outs to the most fortunate are rescinded. But he has also, in more of a stretch, wholeheartedly embraced the social extremism of the Religious Right.
Romney’s still distrusted by many on the Religious Right — he was for abortion rights before he was against them, once promised to establish “full equality for American gay and lesbian citizens” and distributed pink fliers at a gay pride parade, and, of course is a Mormon. But that hasn’t kept him from kowtowing to the Religious Right leaders who still hold enormous sway in the Republican party.
In the most recent illustration yet of Romney’s quiet acceptance of the Radical Right, he is scheduled to speak at next week’s far-right Values Voter Summit, a Washington get-together sponsored by designated hate groups the American Family Association and the Family Research Council. At the event, Romney will take the stage immediately after AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer, a man whose record of outspoken bigotry is so shocking he would be an anathema to any reasonable political movement. Fischer wants to deport American Muslims, says gays are responsible for the Holocaust and claims Native Americans are “morally disqualified” from controlling land. He also claims that non-Christian religions don’t have First Amendment rights – among the faiths he has singled out as exceptions to the free exercise clause is Romney’s own Mormonism. I have called on Romney to distance himself from Fischer’s bigotry before handing him the microphone on Saturday… but don’t hold your breath.
Participants at the Values Voter Summit rarely check their less savory values at the door. At last year’s event, which Romney also attended, FRC president Tony Perkins managed to simultaneously insult both gay troops and several allied nations by insisting that nations that allow gay people to serve openly in the military “participate in parades, they don’t fight wars to keep the nation and the world free.” Neither Romney nor any of the other GOP luminaries present spoke up in response.
At the Values Voter Summit, as in the GOP debates, Mitt Romney will doubtless attempt to slide under the radar, never openly condoning extremism, but never contradicting it either. As he emerges as the GOP frontrunner, it needs to be asked: is Mitt Romney more moderate than his fellow candidates, or is he just better at strategically keeping his extremism quiet?
By: Michael B. Keegan, President: People for The American Way, October 4, 2011
They Don’t Like You, Mitt. They Really Don’t Like You
Republican moneymen and pundits are starting to flock to the Mitt Romney banner, sending forth the word that it is time to bow to the inevitable. But the Republican voters just do not like Mitt Romney.
The depth the of the base’s resistance to falling in behind next-in-line Romney has continuously shocked observers, resulting first in the rise of Donald Trump, then Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry. Now Perry is swooning, and his support has gone to … Herman Cain!
In the latest Washington Post poll, Perry’s support has halved over the last month, but Romney remains stuck at 25 percent. Cain has risen to 16 percent. The new CBS poll has Cain tied, at 17 percent, for first place with Romney. PPP polled Republicans in North Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia, and found Cain leading in all three states.
I don’t think Cain can win the nomination, and I’m not sure he really wants it (as opposed to a nice Fox News gig.) Saying you might vote for Herman Cain for president — of the United States, not of a pizza chain — can only be read as a cry of protest.
I don’t see how Republicans could be making this any more plain. They do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.
His problem is summed up neatly by today’s The Wall Street Journal editorial:
The main question about Mr. Romney is whether his political character matches the country’s huge current challenges. The former Bain Capital CEO is above all a technocrat, a man who believes in expertise as the highest political virtue. The details of his RomneyCare program in Massachusetts were misguided enough, but the larger flaw it revealed is Mr. Romney’s faith that he can solve any problem, and split any difference, if he can only get the smartest people in the room. …Republicans need a nominee who can make the opposing case on practical and moral grounds, not shrink from it out of guilt or excess political caution.
This encapsulates the main difference between the two parties. I’ve made this point many times before, but I think it’s pretty fundamental. The conservative movement is committed to a series of strong philosophical principles about government. They believe in a smaller government that takes less from the rich on moral grounds, as the Journal says. The Democratic Party does not have the same kind of deeper philosophical commitment, and is much more comfortable with technocracy.
Romney’s technocratic skills are not only not a plus for him. For many conservatives, they are something close to a disqualification. On many of the largest public issues, the technocratic consensus binds the center-right with the center-left and excludes the Republican position. Technocrats generally agree that we should increase short-term deficits while simultaneously decreasing long-term deficits through a combination of reducing tax expenditures and entitlement spending. There’s a somewhat less strong technocratic consensus that we should find a way to put a price on carbon emissions. These are all policies supported by the Obama administration and fiercely opposed by the GOP because they do violence to conservative anti-government principles.
Conservatives don’t want a president who’s open to different means of achieving ends (ending the recession, controlling health care costs.) They want somebody who’s set in stone on using the right means — less government.
Romney, because of the bizarre succession of real and potential foes removing themselves from consideration, may win the nomination by default. But the mismatch between him and the party he wants to lead is not going away.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Inte, New York Magazine, October 5, 2011
Desperately Seeking A Candidate: Republicans Falling In And Out Of Love
Here’s my question for the Republican Party: How’s that Rick Perry stuff workin’ out for ya?
You’ll recall that Sarah Palin asked a similar question last year about President Obama’s “ hopey-changey stuff.” Indeed, hopey-changey has been through a bad patch. But now the GOP is still desperately seeking a presidential candidate it can love. Or even like.
That Perry was crushed by Herman Cain — yes, I said Herman Cain — in the Florida straw poll Saturday confirms that the tough-talking Texas governor’s campaign is in serious trouble. He’s the one who put it there with a performance in last week’s debate that was at times disjointed, at times disastrous.
Perry was supposed to be the “Shane”-like Western hero who brought peace to the troubled valley that is the Republican presidential field. A month after he rode into town, however, increasingly frantic GOP insiders are begging New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to saddle up and save the day.
After watching Perry in the debate, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol — a card-carrying member of the Republican establishment — had a one-word reaction: “Yikes.”
Perry got off to what his supporters consider a strong start, which means he spoke in complete sentences. After the first hour, however, he began to slip into gibberish — as when he said his program for controlling the border with Mexico without building a fence includes putting “the aviation assets on the ground,” and when he described the nation between Afghanistan and India as “the Pakistani country.”
Then he wound up for his big attack on Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. This is what came out:
“I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.”
Yikes, yikes and double yikes.
The prospect of Perry standing next to Obama on a debate stage may have freaked out the GOP establishment, but what angered the party’s base was Perry’s position on illegal immigration. It is both reasonable and compassionate, meaning it is also completely unacceptable.
At issue was Perry’s initiative to let the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants in Texas pay in-state tuition at state universities. “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said.
Two days later, in the straw poll, Florida Republicans showed him just how heartless they can be.
I don’t know anyone who believes that Cain’s big victory — he captured 37 percent of the vote, compared with Perry’s 15 percent and Romney’s 14 percent — is a sign that the Hermanator’s campaign is about to catch fire, except perhaps Cain himself. Instead, it was a vote of no confidence in what still looks like a strikingly weak field.
Michele Bachmann swiftly rose and fell in the polls. If Perry traces the same arc, the temptation would be to conclude that the party has resigned itself to Romney and is ready to fall in line. But Romney has been running for nearly five years now and still hasn’t overcome an uncomfortable truth: The party’s just not that into him.
At this point, you have to wonder if the GOP will fall in love with anybody. I’m trying to imagine the candidate who can maintain credibility with the party’s establishment and Tea Party wings. If the ultra-flexible Romney isn’t enough of a political contortionist to do it, who is?
Given the state of the economy, Obama’s going to have a tough re-election fight no matter what. But while the president flies around the country knitting the Democratic Party’s various constituencies back together, Republicans are still waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right to ride over the horizon.
I don’t know if Christie can ride a horse, but this movie’s not over yet.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 26, 2011
Rick Perry And The Texas Non-Miracle
About all those new jobs created under Gov. Rick Perry…
The Center for Immigration Studies reports some facts that should sprinkle a little cold water on over-heated claims for the low-wage/high-immigration Texas economic model.
Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).
Absorb that for a minute.
Native-born Texans have experienced a jobs catastrophe very similar to that of Americans everywhere else in the United States, reports CIS:
The share of working-age natives holding a job in Texas declined significantly, from 71 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2011. This decline is very similar to the decline for natives in the United States as a whole and is an indication that the situation for native-born workers in Texas is very similar to the overall situation in the country despite the state’s job growth.
What we are seeing here is not a pattern of job creation. It is a pattern of job displacement.
The large share of job growth that went to immigrants is surprising because the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas’ working-age population (16 to 65). Thus, even though natives made up most of the growth in potential workers, most of the job growth went to immigrants.
And by the way – it’s not just a matter of jobs “Americans won’t do.” As the decline in native-born employment shows, these are jobs natives used to do as recently as 2007. And the displacement is occurring higher and higher up the pay scale.
Immigrants took jobs across the educational distribution. More than one out three (97,000) of newly arrived immigrants who took a job had at least some college.
In all this, illegal immigration remains a huge factor, despite the often-heard claim that illegal immigration has slowed since the end of the housing bubble.
Of newly arrived immigrants who took jobs in Texas since 2007, we estimate that 50 percent (113,000) were illegal immigrants. Thus, about 40 percent of all the job growth in Texas since 2007 went to newly arrived illegal immigrants and 40 percent went to newly arrived legal immigrants.
A couple of conclusions follow:
1) There was no Texas miracle, from the point of view of the people who constituted the population of Texas back in 2007.
2) Rick Perry’s permissive view of immigration is not (as I’ve pointed out before) some compassionate-conservative exception to his no-soup-for-you economic policy. A permissive immigration is the indispensable prerequisite to the no-soup-for-you economy over which Perry presided.
3) Immigration is not an issue separate from the debate over employment and growth. It’s integral. You could plausibly argue in the 2000s that immigration was ancillary to job growth for Americans – or even that it somehow spurred job growth for Americans. In today’s context however, immigration is increasingly a substitute for job growth for Americans.
4) Mitt Romney finally has his answer the next time Rick Perry attacks him for Massachusetts poor jobs ranking in the early part of the 2000s.
“The numbers show, Governor, that your economic policy was great at creating jobs – for Mexico.”
By: David Frum, The Frum Forum, September 22, 2011
Romney’s Stupidest Idea Of The Week
One of the signature policy proposals that Mitt Romney outlined in his economic plan and highlighted in his USA Today op-ed last week is a policy that is as pernicious in practice as it sounds unthreatening. On page 61 of his plan, Romney proposes to cap the rate at which agencies would impose new regulations at zero. This means that if an agency is required by law to issue a new regulation, it must offset the costs, presumably by eliminating some other regulations. Essentially, Romney is proposing to adopt pay-as-you-go budgeting to regulations.
It’s not entirely clear if this rule applies to each agency—would the Food and Drug Administration have to eliminate some food inspection rules if they created some new regulations of food?—or if this is government-wide policy, so if the government creates rules in one area, it would be required to undo rules in another, unrelated area. But either way, this policy would have far-reaching negative consequences. Imagine, for instance, if a cap on regulations was in place after the financial crisis, when lack of regulation of Wall Street led to the cratering of the economy. Under this proposal, in order to regulate Wall Street to ensure that economic devastation couldn’t happen again, the federal government would have to eliminate regulations on food or water or air, or some other protections. Where is the logic of undoing clean air regulations because new consumer protections are needed?
Behind this policy response is a simple animosity towards any rules for businesses that come at the expense of profits. Republicans have been arguing that regulatory uncertainty is hurting job growth because businesses supposedly refuse to make hiring decisions when they don’t know what the rules will be. But if anything were going to feed uncertainty, it would be a rule that haphazardly and randomly picks old rules to eliminate once new rules were created. Companies make decisions about their future assuming those regulations stay in place; eliminating old regulations will simply favor some firms over others.
The bigger point to be made, however, is that regulations are not what are ailing our economy now, nor are they hindering growth. McClatchy recently surveyed small business owners on why they weren’t employing additional people—none offered regulation among the barriers to hiring. (That’s why it’s particularly unfortunate that the president recently fed the Republican obsession with his suspension of the ozone rule, citing “regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover,” as part of his rationale.) In fact, if anything, greater regulation can be correlated with greater growth: Over the last 50 years, the decades of the highest growth rates for our economy saw the greatest expansion of government and its regulations. Growth rates were highest in the 1960s at 4.55 percent for the decade, when we created Medicare, Medicaid, and the Great Society poverty programs—our greatest expansion of government. And growth rates were the lowest in the last decade, averaging only 1.38 percent. I think it is safe to say George Bush was not a friend of regulation.
But if regulations aren’t the culprit, what is? What’s holding up hiring now is that there is not enough demand in the economy. Even bond traders like Bill Gross acknowledge the need for direct federal help for job creation and growth. To actually create jobs, Republicans should come to the table with the president and pass ideas they have supported in the past, like investment in roads and bridges and hiring teachers who have been laid off. But because Republican ideology will not tolerate federal policies that actually help create jobs, they are reduced to pithy sounding policies on regulations that are just another way of getting rid of protections for consumers in order to help corporations.
As a former policy director on a presidential campaign, I am sympathetic to the desire to try to propose “new” policy ideas that sound good in a speech or a press paper. In the back and forth of a campaign, reporters, campaign press staff, and even the candidates can demand new policies in areas that have been well-trodden and don’t typically make for exciting speeches. But a serious candidate has to put forward serious ideas to solve actual problems. And for a candidate trying to distinguish himself from a Texas governor ready to shoot from the hip, Mitt Romney’s cap on regulation does not meet that test.
By: Neera Tanden, COO, Center for American Progress, Published in The New Republic, September 12, 2011
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