“Republican Playbook”:The Politics Of Fear And The Party Of Non-Voters
The latest Pew Research Center poll shows Mitt Romney ahead of President Barack Obama among likely voters, 49% to 45%. But the latest Gallup poll shows the President Obama leading Romney among likely voters, 50% to 45%.
What gives? The Pew poll covered the days immediately following last Wednesday’s presidential debate. It didn’t include last weekend. The Gallup poll, by contrast, included the weekend — after September’s jobs report showed unemployment down to 7.8 percent for the first time in more than three years.
So it’s fair to conclude the bump the President received from the jobs report bump made up for the bump Romney got from the debate. No surprise that voters care more about jobs than they do about debate performance.
But don’t be misled. The race has tightened up.
Moreover, polls of “likely voters” are notoriously imprecise because they reflect everyone who says they’re likely to vote – including those who hope to but won’t, as well as those who won’t but don’t want to admit it.
Remember: The biggest party in America is neither Democrats nor Republicans. It’s the party of non-voters — a group that outnumbers the other two.
So the real question is which set of potential supporters is more motivated on Election Day (or via absentee ballot) to bother to vote.
The biggest motivator in this election isn’t enthusiasm about either of the candidates. The Republican base has never particularly liked Romney, and many Democrats have been disappointed in Obama.
The biggest motivator is fear of the other guy.
There’s clear reason for Democrats and Independents to fear Romney and Ryan — their reverse Robin-Hood budgets that take from the poor and middle class and reward the rich; their determination to do away with Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Dodd-Frank constraints on Wall Street, and ObamaCare; their opposition to abortion even after rape or incest, and rejection of equal marriage rights; their support for “profiling” immigrants; and their disdain of the “47 percent,” to name a few.
And the thought of the next Supreme Court justices being picked by someone who thinks corporations are people should strike horror in the mind of any thinking American.
Yet Romney is such a chameleon that in last Wednesday’s debate he appeared to disavow everything he’s stood for, hide many of his former positions, and even sound somewhat moderate.
Meanwhile, for four years the GOP and its auxiliaries in Fox News and yell radio have told terrible lies about our president – charging he wasn’t born in America, he’s a socialist, he doesn’t share American values. They’ve disdained and disrespected President Obama in ways no modern president has had to endure.
They’re drummed up fear in a public battered by an economic crisis Republicans largely created, while hiding George W. Bush so we won’t be reminded. And they’ve channeled that fear toward President Obama and even to the central institutions of our democracy, casting his administration and our government as the enemy.
They’ve apparently convinced almost half of America of their lies – including many who would suffer most under Romney and Ryan.
Republicans are well practiced in the politics of fear and the logistics the big lie. The challenge for Obama and Biden and for the rest of us over the next four weeks is to counter their fearsome lies with the truth.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, October 9, 2012
“Follow-Up Questions”: Unlike The Fawning Coverage He’s Received In The Past, Paul Ryan Shows His Thin Skin
Paul Ryan, we are discovering, does not always handle follow-up questions that well.
The latest evidence came yesterday afternoon, when an interview with a local television reporter in Michigan turned testy and was ended by Ryan’s aide.
The dispute was ostensibly over gun control. Asked by reporter Terry Camp of WJRT in Flint if America has a gun problem, Ryan responded that the country has a crime problem. “Not a gun problem?” Camp asked. “No,” Ryan replied, arguing that existing laws should be enforced and that “the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities” – for “charities, and civic groups and churches” to teach people “good discipline, good character.”
“And you can do all that by cutting taxes – with a big tax cut,” Camp replied.
“Those are your words, not mine,” Ryan said, at which point his aide stepped in to end the interview.
“That was kind of strange – trying to stuff words in people’s mouths,” Ryan told Camp as he took his microphone off.
As Erik Wemple points out, it’s unclear what Camp’s intent here was. Ryan interpreted his words about tax cuts as a rude expression of skepticism and editorializing, but Camp and the station insist he wasn’t trying to make any kind of political statement and was merely asking another question. It’s certainly possible that Camp was just trying to prompt Ryan to expand his thoughts, and that he used some clumsy short-hand to do it.
The way Ryan chose to handle this seems noteworthy, though. Several times in the past few months, he’s been pressed by reporters and has had trouble deflecting lines of questioning that make him uncomfortable.
When he first joined the GOP ticket, for instance, Ryan sat for what everyone assumed would be a friendly interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume, who asked him about the long amount of time – not until 2040 – that it would take his fiscal blueprint to produce a balanced budget. Ryan replied that he wasn’t running on his budget plan – he was running on Romney’s. OK, Hume replied, well how long will it take Romney’s plan to bring about a balanced budget.
“I don’t know exactly when it balances,” Ryan conceded, “because we have – I don’t want to get wonky on you, but we have to run the numbers on that specific plan.”
More recently, there was Ryan’s sit-down with Fox’s Chris Wallace, who quizzed him about the Romney tax plan’s lack of specificity. Romney proposes a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut and insists he’ll make it deficit neutral by closing loopholes and deductions, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Wallace challenged Ryan to explain how the math would work.
“Well, I don’t have the time,” Ryan replied. “It would take me too long to go through all the math.”
That answer won Ryan no shortage of ridicule. It points to the steep learning curve he’s faced since being tapped as Romney’s No. 2. As a congressman, Ryan has been unusually visible, but the press coverage he’s received has tended to be rather fawning – reporters, columnists and television hosts giving him a chance to outline his plan and the hailing him as the rare adult in DC who’s willing to produce serious ideas.
It’s easy to get accustomed to that kind of treatment. But since August (and particularly since his vice presidential acceptance speech), the media has treated him with more skepticism, demanding that he and Romney fill in the blanks on their plans. Ryan doesn’t always seem used to aggressive scrutiny and follow-up questioning in interviews, and it’s shown on several occasions now. The interview with Camp isn’t a huge deal, but Ryan probably could have handled it in a way that didn’t create a big story. It’s a reminder that he’s still learning. And it makes this week’s VP debate that much more interesting, since Ryan figures to come in for some aggressive questioning from his opponent, Joe Biden.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, October 9, 2012
“Liberals Need To Get A Grip”: While Others Push Opinions To Extremes, Feel Free To Stop Rending Your Garments
As a liberal who writes about politics for a living, I’ve spent the last few days talking to increasingly panicked Democrats, who have begun to overreact to the fact that President Obama had a poor debate performance, which then produced a movement in some polls toward Mitt Romney. I think David Weigel put it well yesterday: “The first presidential debate has come to remind me of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Democrats walked out of the theater/turned off the TV saying ‘huh, well, I wanted it to be better.’ After a few days of talking to friends, it changes from a disappointment into the worst piece of crap in human history.” Andrew Sullivan kind of went nuclear after seeing the Pew poll I discussed yesterday, writing a post titled, “Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?” I can answer that: No.
For many years, psychologists and sociologists have known that in small groups, a uniformity of opinion can push opinion to the extremes. For instance, if you get a group of liberals together and tell them to talk about military spending, by the time the discussion is over, each individual will end up favoring spending cuts even deeper than they favored before the discussion began. There’s an analogous movement in the opinions liberals have undergone since last Wednesday, but here conservatives and the mainstream media play a role as well. There’s no question that reporters, eager for a new storyline and an invigorated race, have seized on the idea that the debate changed everything. And as Kevin Drum explains, conservatives benefit from their large stable of hacks:
Here’s how things would have gone if liberals had their fair share of hacks. Obviously Obama wasn’t at his best on Wednesday. But when the debate was over that wouldn’t have mattered. Conservatives would have started crowing about how well Romney did. Liberals would have acknowledged that Obama should have confronted Romney’s deceptions more forcefully, but otherwise would have insisted that Obama was more collected and presidential sounding than the hyperactive Romney and clearly mopped the floor with him on a substantive basis. News reporters would then have simply reported the debate normally: Romney said X, Obama said Y, and both sides thought their guy did great. By the next day it would barely be a continuing topic of conversation, and by Friday the new jobs numbers would have buried it completely.
Instead, liberals went batshit crazy. I didn’t watch any commentary immediately after the debate because I wanted to write down my own reactions first, and my initial sense was that Obama did a little bit worse than Romney. But after I hit the Publish button and turned on the TV, I learned differently. As near as I could tell, the entire MSNBC crew was ready to commit ritual suicide right there on live TV, Howard Beale style. Ditto for all their guests, including grizzled pols like Ed Rendell who should have known better. It wasn’t just that Obama did poorly, he had delivered the worst debate performance since Clarence Darrow left William Jennings Bryan a smoking husk at the end of Inherit the Wind. And it wasn’t even just that. It was a personal affront, a betrayal of everything they thought was great about Obama. And, needless to say, it put Obama’s entire second term in jeopardy and made Romney the instant front runner.
Kevin is absolutely right about this, and it shows not only that there’s a difference between the conservative and liberal media worlds, but between MSNBC and Fox specifically. While MSNBC made a decision a while back that it would go ahead and become the liberal cable network, particularly in prime time, the individuals who appear on those shows have limits to how hackish they’re willing to be. On Fox, there really are no limits. It’s not as if Steve Doocy and the rest of the crew at “Fox and Friends” are going to say, “Wait, we’re supposed to say the jobs numbers are manipulated by a White House conspiracy? I really don’t think that’s supported by the facts.” I guarantee you that even if Obama performs spectacularly in the second debate and Romney stumbles terribly, Sean Hannity will still get on the air immediately afterward and tell everyone watching that Romney was fantastic and Obama was terrible. This will not only help buck up conservatives, it will encourage reporters to discuss the debate in the way Kevin describes.
Some people have said that Obama’s performance was the worst in history, but that’s just ridiculous. George W. Bush was much worse in all his debates in 2004, Bob Dole was terrible in 1996, George H.W. Bush was awful in 1992, and the worst debate performance was without question Ronald Reagan’s in his first debate in 1984, where he was barely coherent and, in retrospect, probably showing some initial signs of Alzheimer’s. You’ll note that two of the people I just mentioned ended up winning. Obama didn’t do particularly well last Wednesday, it’s true. But he’s a very competitive guy, and I’m sure he’s going to show up next week with plenty more focus and vigor. There are a lot of other factors—a recovering economy, the fact that it now looks like he’ll have more money, a superior ground operation—that continue to make him the favorite. So liberals can feel free to stop rending their garments.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 9, 2012
” A Constantly Moving Target”: Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Speech Brings More Lies And Reversals In Positions
It would be laughable were it not so completely serious.
As I listened intently to Governor Romney’s foreign policy address delivered this morning at the Virginia Military Institute, I was sure I heard him say that President Obama had not signed so much as one free-trade agreement during the past three years.
The statement struck such a discordant note I pressed the rewind button to make sure I had heard the Governor correctly.
Sure enough, that’s what he said.
Apparently, the Romney campaign did not get the memo—or more likely chose to ignore the facts—that it was on October 23, 2011, not one year ago, when, in a rare moment of bi-partisanship, President Obama signed free-trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.
Even the Republicans were happy about the event as Speaker of the House, John Boehner, issued a statement saying, “years of perseverance have been rewarded today as American job creators will have new opportunities to expand and hire as they access new markets abroad.”
Why would Romney say such a thing when it is so obviously disprovable?
If you have the answer to that question, maybe you can then tell me why Mr. Romney would also include in his address a bold statement of commitment to a two state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the important role he could play in bringing about the same, when we all heard him say precisely the opposite in the now infamous “47 percent” videotape of his speech at a fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida.
In case you need a reminder, here is what Romney said in that conversation which was intended to be private—
“I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way. So what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem…and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”
And yet, in today’s speech, Gov. Romney said—
“Finally, I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel. On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew.”
Not only does Romney completely turn tail on what he expressed in private, he actually blames the President in today’s speech for failing at something Romney is on record as saying is an unsolvable problem.
And maybe someone can tell me why Governor Romney chose to excoriate President Obama for not getting sufficiently involved in the internal skirmishes taking place in various Middle-Eastern countries when Romney went on record, in an April 2011 op-ed he penned for the National Review, and accused the President of being too aggressive in Libya by committing what he called ‘mission creep’?
Of course, it is possible Governor Romney simply forgot his most recent position on Libya given the number of times he changed his stance on that conflict.
In what might be considered a precursor to the now familiar Romney proclivity for “evolving” his stance to reflect what he thinks will best sell at any given moment, the Governor went through such a remarkable evolution during our efforts to assist the Libyans free themselves of the Gadhafi regime.
As Jake Tapper lays out in his October 20, 2011 piece on Romney’s ever changing view of our involvement in Libya, Romney managed to work through three, distinct positions on the topic over a one month period. The first was expressed in March of 2011, when the Governor criticize the Obama administration for being weak and not getting involved more quickly.
The second Romney position was no position at all, illustrated when, just one month following his initial take, Romney failed to even mention Libya during a speech delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas where the Governor criticized Obama’s Middle-East policy. Having strangely omitted to discuss Libya during that speech, reporters sought to get the Governor to respond to questions on the topic. The encounter was described by the Las Vegas Review Journal as follows: “Romney was silent on Libya, the newest and stickiest military and U.S. policy problem as the United States and its NATO allies enforce a no-fly zone to help rebels oust Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. After his speech, Romney refused to take questions from reporters about his position on Libya. Instead, he and his wife, Ann, fled down a hallway and escaped up an escalator at The Venetian, where the event was held. ‘I’ve got a lot of positions on a lot of topics, but walking down the hall probably isn’t the best place to describe all those,’ Romney said, deflecting a Libya query as he walked quickly with half a dozen journalists trailing him.”
Finally, in the April op-ed Romney posted at Nationalreview.com, as noted and linked above, Romney wrote that he had, indeed, supported President Obama’s “specific, limited mission” but went on to then criticize Obama for getting further involved in what Romney called “mission creep”.
So, in March, Romney deemed the American response to what was happening in Libya as weak only to evolve his message —just one month later—to one expressing initial support for the administration’s limited mission and then criticized Obama for going too far.
Confused?
Get used to it. If there is one thing we know for sure, we will continue to have no idea of where Governor Romney really stands on both domestic and foreign issues because where he stands is a constantly moving target.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, October 9, 2012
“Not Very Much”: Without The Economy, What Does Romney Have Left Against Obama?
Last Friday’s new job numbers demonstrate that Barack Obama has started to turn around the economy George W. Bush ran aground.
Don’t get me wrong. A 7.8 percent jobless rate is way too high. And the effective jobless rate which includes part-time workers who want full-time work and Americans who have given up hope of ever finding jobs is even worse.
But there have been 31 straight months of growth in the number of private sector jobs. The unemployment rate is still high but there has been a slow and steady decrease in the jobless rate. The picture is even brighter in the battleground states that will pick the next president. In Iowa, the unemployment rate is only 5.5, and it is 5.7 percent in New Hampshire. The unemployment rate would be even lower if the GOP majority in the House of Representatives had approved the president’s proposed American Jobs Act which would have given state and local governments the funds to rehire hundreds of thousands of the teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public employees who had lost their jobs in the last few years.
One of the striking things about recent national surveys is that Americans now think that Barack Obama is as capable of handling the economy as Mitt Romney. The Battleground national poll conducted for George Washington University last week shows that there are almost as many voters (47 percent) who think President Obama is the best candidate to handle the economy as there are voters (49 percent) who think Romney is the better man for the job.
Romney’s business credentials were his ace in the hole but he played his hand poorly. The steady increase in employment has certainly helped restore trust in the president’s capacity to nourish the economy but the GOP nominee has undermined his own image as a successful entrepreneur.
Romney is his own worst enemy. The infamous “47 percent” video exposed Romney’s callous disregard for Americans like seniors and veterans who are economically dependent on government benefits. The video clearly had an impact on Romney’s standing. The Battleground survey shows the president with a big advantage (56 percent to 40 percent) over Romney for standing up for the middle class.
If the president does win re-election, I suspect that many pundits will say the 47 percent video was the turning point of the campaign. But I think the real pivot point was during the spring when the Obama campaign exposed what Rick Perry called Romney’s time at Bain Capital a career in “vulture capitalism.” At the time, most Democratic insiders dismissed the anti-Bain preemptive attack ads, but they put Romney on the defensive on the only issue that could help him win the campaign. The president also helped himself when he adopted an aggressive message of economic populism in the fall of 2011 after he finally got frustrated over Republican obstructionism.
Monday, Romney gave a speech on foreign policy at the Virginia Military Institute. He has talked about national security a lot lately, and the Romney campaign’s focus on foreign policy may be an admission by Romney that he has lost the edge he had over the president on the economy. Romney’s new emphasis on foreign policy is counterproductive since few voters care about it and because voters give the president good marks for international relations. According to the Battleground poll, few Americans indicate that the wars in the Middle East (4 percent) or terrorism (2 percent) are the most important issues in the campaign. By a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent, voters choose the president as the candidate best able to handle foreign policy.
A story in Politico on Tuesday indicated that the Romney family is pushing the candidate to de-emphasize his anti-Obama economic rhetoric. But if the GOP candidate stops beating up on the president for his economic performance, what does Romney have left? The answer is not very much.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 9, 2012
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