“Loose Leaf Binders”: What Does Mitt Romney Really Want For Women?
Women watching the debate last night let out a collective “hallelujah”: issues of direct importance to our lives finally merited a mention. We got equal pay, contraception, Planned Parenthood, poverty and bizarre discussions of single mothers.
Mitt Romney tried hard to pretend he’ll come down on women’s side in these issues. But as is classic Mitt, his positions send mixed messages. What does Mitt Romney really want for women? What would he do to improve their economic outlook? It depends on which talking point you listen to.
Romney took a few opportunities last night to discuss the ways in which he wants more women in the workforce. When asked a direct question about equal pay, he sidestepped to talk about how few women tend to be represented in top political posts, bringing out his now infamous “binders full of women” story to describe how he asked aides to find qualified women to fill his cabinet as governor. He also talked about wanting women to have more flexible work hours and brought up the fact that women have lost a huge number of jobs in the recovery. All signs point to: Mitt wants to help women get to work.
But does he? First, there’s the debunk now being widely circulated claiming that the binders Mitt asked for were actually put together before he even asked for them—not to mention that a study found the percentage of senior-level positions he appointed to women actually declined during his administration. But these statements clash heavily with some other comments he’s made. When discussing early childhood education recently, he commented, “It’s an advantage to have two parents, but to have one parent to stay closely connected and at home during those early years of education can be very, very important.” Which gender tends to be that “parent” who stays out of the workforce to be home? It is overwhelmingly mothers.
There’s also a big question as to how much he really wants to help unemployed women get back to work. He may cite the statistic that 580,000 women lost their jobs in the last four years, but he rarely makes mention of why. I’ll fill in that blank: mostly because of public sector layoffs. Women have lost 383,000 government jobs since the beginning of the recovery, wiping out more than a third of their private sector job gains. Yet Romney has repeatedly said he wants to see fewer workers on the government payrolls, including teachers, who are overwhelmingly women. He’s yet to explain how those two viewpoints can coexist.
Mitt would also have you believe he wants fewer women living in poverty. When talking about rising poverty rates, he rightly pointed out that the majority are women. “There are three and a half million more women living in poverty today than when the president took office,” he said. “We don’t have to live like this.”
It’s true, Mitt, we don’t. Because we could be doing far more to support people who fall below the poverty line, particularly women, by shoring up programs that are failing them such as TANF (formally known as welfare) and child care assistance. Yet that’s not what he would do once in office. His running mate’s budget, which Romney has said he’d sign if it made it to his desk, would focus 62 percent of its spending cuts on programs that support the poor, such as food stamps, Medicaid and Pell Grants. There’s reason to believe Romney would go even further: he’s calling for about $2 trillion more spending on defense over the next decade than Ryan is, which would mean drastic cuts—about 40 percent across the board—in all other programs.
And then there are his feelings about single mothers. When asked a question about gun control, he inexplicably ended up talking about single mothers and how they are apparently at fault for gun violence. (Never mind studies that show no correlation between the two.) In his wandering response, he said, “We need moms and dads helping raise kids. Wherever possible, the—the benefit of having two parents in the home—and that’s not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone—that’s a great idea because if there’s a two-parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically.” (Emphasis mine.) That sounds quite a lot like family planning to me. How does one plan a family? By using contraception to control fertility and have children when and with whom one wants.
And contraception did come up. Romney decided that last night to be on the pro side, stating unequivocally, “Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.” Unfortunately that’s not always his position. First, there are those around him who don’t share this view. The GOP platform, for example, calls for a personhood amendment, which would endanger some forms of contraception. Then there’s Paul Ryan’s statement that he and Romney would do away with co-pay-free birth control access as provided by the Affordable Care Act on “day one.” And, oh yeah, Romney has previously condemned that very provision himself, even supporting Senator Roy Blunt’s bizarre proposal to allow employers to refuse birth control coverage in their insurance policies if they feel icky about it.
For his part, President Obama pointed out that contraception is an economic issue for the women who need and want access to it. He also made a case for the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a bill that takes a step toward closing the gender wage gap (even though there is much more that needs to be done) while Romney offered up no policy solutions. Obama has previously proposed spending money to hire back some of the teachers who have been laid off in the crisis. He would expand Medicaid to cover more people living in poverty and has expanded Pell Grants and job training programs to help those living in poverty. Clearly there are ways Obama can be pushed to do more for women. But it’s not even clear which side Romney is on.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, October 17, 2012
“I Love Vetoes”: Mitt Romney’s False Claims Of Bipartisanship In Massachusetts
In Tuesday night’s presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mitt Romney said, “We haven’t had the leadership in Washington to work on a bipartisan basis. I was able to do that in my state.” This repeats a claim he made repeatedly in the first debate that he worked successfully in with the Democratic state legislature in Massachusetts. “Republicans and Democrats both love America,” said Romney. “But we need to have leadership—leadership in Washington that will actually bring people together and get the job done and could not care less if—if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.”
Romney also argues that an ability to work across the aisle is essential for any president, and that it is a quality he has and Obama lacks. At the first debate, Romney said, regarding a deficit reduction deal, “I think something this big, this important has to be done on a bipartisan basis. And we have to have a president who can reach across the aisle and fashion important legislation with the input from both parties.”
Romney’s surrogates have even gone so far as to offer his bipartisanship approach as the reason he will not specify what tax expenditures he will eliminate to offset the cost of his tax cuts, arguing that he should work with Congress to identify them, rather than dictating his own preferences.
During the primaries, when Romney claimed to have been “a severely conservative governor,” he never boasted of working with Democrats.
In truth, his approach in Massachusetts was neither severely conservative nor bipartisan. Democrats in the legislature held a veto-proof super-majority. That meant Romney had no choice but to play ball with them or else he would get nothing done. Sometimes he opted for the former, as in the case of healthcare reform. Often, he opted for the latter.
Looking at Romney’s record in Massachusetts one does not see bipartisanship as an operating principle. Rather than it is a tool he uses when it is convenient. Romney was not particularly good at cultivating relationships with the Democratic legislature. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran told the Associated Press, “Initially [Romney’s] sense was, ‘I have been elected governor, I am the CEO here and you guys are the board of directors and you monitor the implementation of what I say.’ That ruffled the feathers of legislators who see themselves as an equal branch (of government).”
Romney’s approach to the legislature remained mostly hostile, rather than conciliatory. As NPR reports:
Romney clearly did not relish having to work with a Legislature that was 85 percent Democratic. He pushed hard during his first two years as governor to boost the number of Republicans on Beacon Hill. But that effort was a failure; Republicans ended up losing seats in the midterm elections…. Apart from health care, Romney defined success not with big-picture legislative accomplishments but with confrontation. In a 2008 campaign ad, Romney actually bragged about taking on his Legislature: “I like vetoes; I vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor,” he said.
Romney issued some 800 vetoes, and the Legislature overrode nearly all of them, sometimes unanimously.
In 2005 and 2006, after Romney decided not to run for re-election but instead to seek the Republican presidential nomination, he abandoned much of his erstwhile moderation. Massachusetts pulled out the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, abandoned his smart growth policies, and reversed his prior support for abortion rights and stem cell research. Refusing to make investments in stem cell research and renewable energy—two important sectors of Massachusetts’s economy—contributed to his abysmal record on job creation.
It is also hard to reach across the aisle when you aren’t even in town. Towards the end of Romney’s tenure, he was out of the state more than he was in it. In 2006, Romney’s last year in office, he was traveling out of state for all or part more than 200 days. During his total four years he was out of the state more than 400 days. While on the road, speaking to Republican audiences, he would frequently mock Massachusetts for its liberal politics. By the time he left office, his approval ratings back home were 34 percent.
If anything, Romney’s approach in the White House would be even more partisan and polarizing. In Massachusetts, Romney was not only governing with Democratic legislature but with a liberal electorate. What he did under those circumstances could be quite different from what he would do with a Republican Congress and a national Republican constituency.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, October 17, 2012
“Believe Me Because I Said So”: Mitt Romney Goes From Etch A Sketch To Sketchy
“Lead from behind” may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate’s wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him into confusing petulance with strength.
For Obama’s supporters, the fact that the president played offense, had a strategy and seemed happy in his work was reason enough for elation. But the most electorally significant performance was Romney’s. Under pressure this time, the former Massachusetts governor displayed his least attractive sides. He engaged in pointless on-stage litigation of the debate rules. He repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect for both the president and Candy Crowley, the moderator. And Romney was just plain querulous when anyone dared question him about the gaping holes in his tax and budget plans.
Any high school debate coach would tell a student that declaring, “Believe me because I said so,” is not an argument. Yet Romney confused biography with specificity and boasting with answering a straightforward inquiry. “Well, of course, they add up,” Romney insisted of his budget numbers. “I — I was — I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years, and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget.” Romney was saying: Trust me because I’m an important guy who has done important stuff. He gave his listeners no basis on which to verify the trust he demanded.
Romney’s stonewalling was so obvious that it opened the way for one of Obama’s most effective lines of the evening: “If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t have taken such a sketchy deal. And neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.” Obama sought to make that point in the last debate. This time he had a metaphor and a story to go with the arithmetic.
Romney also covertly disclosed that he, like George W. Bush before him, has every intention of cutting taxes on the rich. Like Bush, he used stealthy language to try to achieve a great fiscal coverup.
Here was Romney on Tuesday: “I will not, under any circumstances, reduce the share that’s being paid by the highest-income taxpayers.” Here was Bush in 2000: “After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes [than] they do today.”
This really matters: Romney intends, as Bush did, to push for steep tax cuts for the wealthy. His only pledge is that he’ll keep the share of the total tax take paid by the wealthy unchanged, presumably by reducing other taxes too. And this is supposed to lead to lower deficits? How?
The most instructive contrast between Debate I and Debate II was the extent to which Romney’s ideas crumbled at the slightest contact with challenge. Romney and Paul Ryan are erecting a Potemkin village designed to survive only until the polls close on Nov. 6. They cannot say directly that they really believe in slashing taxes on the rich and backing away from so much of what government does because they know that neither idea will sell. So they offer soothing language to the middle class, photo ops at homeless programs to convey compassion and a steady stream of attacks on Obama, aimed at shifting all the attention his way.
For his part, Obama looks strong when he calmly and methodically confronts the exceptionally large philosophical and practical differences that now divide the parties. He looks weak when he fuzzes up those differences in the hope of avoiding conflict. The fight is often asymmetric because Obama speaks for balance — between tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, between a thriving market and an active government — while today’s conservatives have no interest in balance.
In the first debate, Obama let Romney back into the race by failing to shake his opponent’s self-presentation. But Romney also put himself into contention by pretending to be a moderate, shelving his plutocratic side and hiding his party’s long-term objectives.
In the second debate, the disguise fell. Romney revealed more of himself than he wanted to and asked voters to endorse a radical tax-cutting program without providing them the details that matter. Sketchy is one word for this. Deceptive is another.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 17, 2012
“Please Proceed, Governor”: A Clear Win For Obama–He Punched Hard, And He Punched With Facts
Not a close call. President Obama won the second presidential debate as clearly and decisively as he lost the first. For anyone who disagrees, three simple words: “Please proceed, Governor.”
This icy invitation to Mitt Romney came amid an exchange about the killings of State Department officials in Libya. Obama noted that in his initial Rose Garden remarks, he classified the attack as an act of terror. Romney, perhaps misinformed by the right-wing propaganda machine, tried to insist that the president waited weeks to call the incident terrorism. “Get the transcript,” Obama said.
Moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and noted that Obama was correct. (Indeed, according to the transcript, Obama classified the attack as among “acts of terror” that would not deter or deflect U.S. foreign policy.) Having embarrassed himself, Romney had the good sense to move on.
It was a moment that encapsulated what Obama accomplished Tuesday night: He punched hard, and he punched with facts.
In these debates, superficialities can be important. Downcast and mopey in the first encounter, this time Obama was sharp and combative throughout. He went after Romney directly and personally; I lost track of the number of times Obama charged that some Romney assertion or another was flatly untrue. He quoted Romney’s past statements that directly contradict what Romney is saying now. All evening, he was in Romney’s face.
It’s not that Romney had an awful night and certainly not that he was some kind of shrinking violet. But in the first debate, Obama’s passivity allowed Romney to interrupt, interject and generally control the flow of the conversation in a way that seemed merely forceful, not obnoxious. Tuesday night, with Obama playing offense, Romney had to dial his own performance up a notch. At times he seemed a little cranky, a little flustered.
The town hall format — and Crowley’s firm hand — ensured that the debate covered quite a lot of ground. Obama got to fight on favorable political terrain. A question about equal pay for women, for example, allowed him to question Romney’s position on women’s reproductive rights and whether health insurance should have to pay for contraception. A question about immigration let Obama note that Romney has vowed to veto the Dream Act for those brought here without papers as children.
Allowing Obama to make direct appeals to women and Latinos was probably not in the Romney game plan.
Romney did get to make his pitch, however. He made clear that the central theme of his candidacy is a promise to create jobs. Given the state of the economy, it would be stunning if people didn’t at least give him a hearing.
“I understand that I can get this country on track again,” Romney said. “We don’t have to settle for what we’re going through. We don’t have to settle for gasoline at four bucks. We don’t have to settle for unemployment at a chronically high level. We don’t have to settle for 47 million people on food stamps. We don’t have to settle for 50 percent of kids coming out of college not able to get work. We don’t have to settle for 23 million people struggling to find a good job. If I become president, I’ll get America working again.”
Obama sought to demonstrate that Romney’s bold words are backed up by nonsensical policies. He wanted to make Romney sound more like a salesman than a statesman. We won’t know until new polls come in whether he succeeded.
But all in all, not Romney’s best outing. Responding to the final question, he said he cared for “100 percent of the American people.” He never should have opened that door, because it invited Obama to give his best speech of the evening:
“I believe Governor Romney is a good man. Loves his family, cares about his faith. But I also believe that when he said behind closed doors that 47 percent of the country considered themselves victims who refuse personal responsibility, think about who he was talking about.
“Folks on Social Security who’ve worked all their lives. Veterans who’ve sacrificed for this country. Students who are out there trying to hopefully advance their own dreams, but also this country’s dreams. Soldiers who are overseas fighting for us right now. People who are working hard every day, paying payroll tax, gas taxes, but don’t make enough income. And I want to fight for them.”
Romney won’t get to respond until the final debate on Monday. The tiebreaker.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 17, 2012
“Democracy Is An Annoying Obstacle”: Plutocrat Bosses To Employees, “Vote For Romney, Or Else”
It’s quickly becoming the story of the election season. Every day there’s a new report of bosses putting pressure on employees to vote for Mitt Romney or very bad things will happen. The threats range from job loss to wage cuts, and the Gilded Age-style strong-arming shows no signs of slowing.
Most recently, we’ve learned that Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, sent an email to workers with the following subject line: “Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below.”
David Siegel, the billionaire founder of Westgate Resorts, has been playing the worker intimidation game. So have the Koch brothers, sending anti-Obama voter materials to 45,000 employees of their Georgia Pacific subsidiary (thanks to AlterNet’s Adele Stan for bringing us that story). In Michigan, the president of Lacks Enterprises warned his company’s 2,300 employees that their paychecks will shrink if Obama is re-elected.
On a June conference call to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Mitt Romney himself enthusiastically pushed the tactic:
“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”
At a time of rampant job insecurity, workers across the country are fearful of doing anything to jeopardize their paychecks. And in a tight race, every vote counts.
Which is what the plutocrats are worried about.
Unfortunately, the history of worker intimidation during election season has a long and sordid history in the United States. Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, notes that such activity has repeatedly bubbled up during periods of turmoil: “In the 19th century, voting was often public, so manufacturers would sometimes march their workers to the polls to vote as a bloc,” said Ferguson. “In company towns, employers used all kinds of tactics to intimidate workers. During political crises, such as the 1890s or the New Deal, heavy-handed efforts by employers to influence worker votes were rampant. In 1896, for example, factory owners posted signs saying that their businesses would close if Republican William McKinley lost to William Jennings Bryan. Similar efforts also marked the New Deal elections of 1936 and 1940.”
In a nation where children are taught that every citizen has the right to vote, it would be nice to think that voter intimidation was relegated to the history books by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But that legislation only outlawed the targeting of voters by race or color.
Bosses have little to fear from knowingly misinforming or threatening workers during election season. Calculated and determined efforts at worker intimidation are as brazen as ever this year. Professor Ferguson notes that the waning power of unions, along with non-enforcement of laws, has emboldened employers. CEOs are feeling quite comfortable putting their intimidation efforts into writing and making them public. There is no federal election law that specifically blocks bosses from telling workers they could lose their jobs if they vote for a particular person.
Defenders of the practice like to say that bosses are just expressing their opinions, much in the way a union might expressing political opinions to the owner of a firm. Except for this small difference: a union can’t fire an employee.
The recent voter intimidation frenzy points to the plutocrats’ pesky problem of basic math: They are outnumbered. Citizen United, which unleashed unlimited corporate spending, certainly tilted things in their favor, but even that has not been enough to ensure that the presidency is in their pocket. The 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession have exposed enough of their dangerous and criminal activity to make voters question the idea of putting a financier in the White House. Ironically, a Romney win would likely lead to austerity policies that would weaken the economy and make the products and services of most businesses harder to sell. But plutocrats can see no further than the number represented by their marginal tax rates, and so they must have Romney in Washington. Democracy is merely an annoying obstacle.
By: Lynn Stuart Parramore, Sr. Editor, AlterNet, October 16, 2012
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