“Reproductive Autonomy Is A Privilege”: Why The Culture War Is Crushing Mitt Romney
Watching the GOP lately, I am reminded of an ominous prediction Gerald Ford made almost nine years before he passed away. The former Republican president, who was unabashedly pro-abortion rights, said that if the party kept going down the ultra-conservative line on issues like abortion, it would not be able to elect another Republican president.
“The American people are basically middle-of-the-road moderates,” he told The New York Times.
Here in 2012, Ford’s words are coming back to haunt Mitt Romney. Although this is supposed to be a “jobs” election, the GOP has a side agenda that has nothing to do with the economy: Transforming modern-day American society into the 1950’s TV show Mad Men.
People-pleasing Romney already has to convince American voters that while he’s not worried about the 47 percent, his tax-cuts-for-the-rich economic plan will somehow improve all of America. But the GOP is also asking Romney to win a culture war, and they’ve armed poor Mitt with a water gun.
Take abortion, for example. Once upon a time, Romney was a politically shrewd, pro-abortion-rights Republican who strongly endorsed upholding Roe v. Wade. But to become the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, Romney has had to exert Olympian effort to prove how much he loves fertilized eggs — and the anti-abortion-rights shouting on the Right hasn’t made his task any easier.
We have Paul Ryan (I’ll give fertilized eggs the legal and constitutional privileges of personhood!), Rick Santorum (I’ll throw abortion doctors in jail!) and Todd Akin (I am granting women magical powers to make sure their eggs are only fertilized during consensual sex!). And of course, there is the GOP platform, which wants to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Is it any wonder Romney is confused?
Aside from the GOP’s apparent lack of cohesion on the issue, the party’s crackdown on contraception also has no place in a jobs election. But to keep up with the social conservatives in his party, Romney loudly opposes requiring employers to cover contraception, and advocates for stripping federal and some state funds from Planned Parenthood.
In other words, Romney is trying to convince American women that reproductive autonomy is a privilege, not a right.
Is this a good way to get American women — 99 percent of whom use contraception during their reproductive years — fired up about the Romney-Ryan health care plan? Given that a recent CNN poll found that Obama is leading among women voters by 12 percentage points, the answer appears to be no.
Gay marriage is the other issue where the GOP is going above and beyond to support a social agenda that hurts Romney’s electability. A Gallup poll this year found that at least half of Americans support legalizing same-sex marriage — a position that President Obama has also taken.
So now, Romney is standing with the fast-depleting 48 percent on the other side of the fence. And sure, some of those Americans undoubtedly support the GOP’s idea that gay marriage shouldn’t be legal, but same-sex couples should get “respect and dignity.” But they aren’t the ones Romney is standing with. Instead he supports anti-gay-rights activists like Sharon Kass, who sends reporters (like me) lengthy emails with provocative statements like: “Being black or female is morally neutral. Having the homosexual disorder is not… while some heterosexual parents have psychological disorders of some type, all homosexual parents have a psychological disorder.”
It’s hard to expect more from Romney than for him to affirm that gay marriage should be left up to the states, and then dropping it. But Romney is actually making it a central campaign issue, tacitly supporting people like Kass and alienating half of America by being on the wrong side of history.
If Romney were running solely on the jobs platform, as he likes to claim he is, we would be in a different election: A recent Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans trust Romney more on the economy — and that poll was conducted almost a week after Mother Jones published the 47 percent video. And in Wednesday night’s debate, Romney made Obama’s grasp on economic issues look tenuous, at best (even though Romney was also making up facts.)
But at the end of the day, it’s unlikely America will put up with the fringe social values the GOP has loaded on its presidential candidate’s back. And whether or not Romney personally supports these deeply conservative positions is almost beside the point — his knees are shaking and his legs are crumpling to the floor. Just as Ford predicted they would.
By: Dana Liebelson, The Week, October 5, 2012
“The Campaign’s Moral Hole”: Budgets And Elections Have Moral Consequences
Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?
The question arises in the wake of last week’s presidential debate. However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.
But there are forces working to make the campaign about something more than a suffocating battle to influence tiny slivers of the electorate. One of my favorite pressure groups, Nuns on the Bus, will be launching a five-day tour on Wednesday through the red, blue and purple parts of Ohio.
Who better than a group of women who have consecrated their lives to the Almighty to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences? Those who serve the impoverished, the sick and the dying know rather a lot about what matters — in life, and in elections.
If some of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops often give the impression that they constitute the Republican Party at prayer, the activist nuns often seem like Democrats at the barricades. And it’s quite true that a struggle is on for the political soul of American Catholicism. Those among the faithful who see the abortion issue as trumping all others are in a quarrel with their brethren who place more emphasis on the church’s long-standing commitment to social justice.
Nuns on the Bus, led by Sister Simone Campbell, are very much players in this dialogue, and Sister Simone addressed the Democratic National Convention last month. Yet she was careful in her speech to emphasize that what she has been saying about government’s obligation to the poor — and about the problems with Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget — reflected what the bishops have been saying, too.
She also noted in an interview last week that she had laid down some conditions before she spoke in Charlotte. “I would talk if I could say that I was pro-life, that I could lift up the people who live in poverty and that the Democrats have a big tent,” she said.
The nuns’ message on poverty got some reinforcement in a statement late last month from Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn. “There are very dark clouds,” they wrote. “Too much rhetoric in the country portrays poor people in a very negative way.”
They argued that the economy is not only failing to “provide sufficient jobs for poor people to earn a decent living to support themselves,” but is also offering fewer “resources for government to do its part for Americans in need.” The situation, they concluded, is “devastating to struggling families throughout the country.”
It’s no accident that the nuns are waging their Ohio campaign against the Ryan budget during the week of the vice presidential debate. One would like to hope that Thursday’s tussle between Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden will be less a parade of numbers and obfuscating talk of “baselines” and concentrate instead on why voters should actually care about what’s in the federal budget.
Sister Simone points to a study from Bread for the World, a genuinely nonpartisan group that advocates on hunger issues, to suggest one useful line of questioning. To make up for the food-stamp cuts in Ryan’s budget, the group found, “every church in the country would have to come up with approximately $50,000 dedicated to feeding people — every year for the next 10 years.” Can government walk away like this? Can we realistically expect our houses of worship to pick up such a tab?
In all the dissections of Obama’s performance in the first debate, not enough attention has been paid to the real problem with his self-presentation: his failure to convey passion for the purposes of government, the requirements of justice and the point of his presidency. “The president,” says Sister Simone, “has gotten disconnected from the people he cares about.”
Nuns on the Bus will no doubt be criticized from the right for intervening in a political campaign, something that doesn’t bother conservatives when religious figures engage on their side. But the nuns’ most important message is to Obama and Biden: Don’t be afraid of reminding voters that budgets and elections have moral consequences. Doing so just might keep debate-watchers from changing the channel.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 7, 2012
“Caught In A Bind”: Taxes Are Certain, But What About Mitt Romney’s Cuts?
Republican Mitt Romney started his campaign calling for big tax cuts, but now he has changed course. He’s warning middle-class families not to raise their hopes too high.
Romney couldn’t have been more emphatic than he was last November at a candidates’ debate in Michigan.
“What I want to do is help the people who’ve been hurt the most, and that’s the middle class,” he said. “And so what I do is focus a substantial tax break on middle-income Americans.”
He put a middle-class tax cut at the top of his priority list: a 20 percent reduction in tax rates across the board.
“Right now, let’s get the job done first that has to be done immediately. Let’s lower the tax rates on middle-income Americans,” he said.
Then, at a debate in Tampa this January, Romney got a little more specific.
“The real question people are gonna ask is, who’s going to help the American people at a time when folks are having real tough times? And that’s why I’ve put forward a plan to eliminate the tax on savings for middle-income Americans,” he said. “Anyone making under $200,000 a year, I would eliminate the tax on interest, dividends and capital gains.”
Shaking Up Tax Plans
But then came Romney’s victory in the primaries, and a new set of goals to meet.
“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said on CNN. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Romney shook up his plans on the tax cuts. He still wanted to lower the tax rates, but now he was more emphatic about the need for tax changes to be revenue-neutral.
In September, he had words of caution for the crowd that filled the gym at a suburban Ohio high school.
“By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions,” he said.
In other words, your tax rate might be lower, but your taxable income might be higher. He elaborated in the Wednesday night debate with President Obama.
“I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families,” he said.
But he avoided details. He said he would work with Congress, and he quickly moved to talk about another goal: lowering the tax rate for small-business people.
“If we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs,” he said.
Will The Tax Cut Stick?
As the campaign goes on, Romney gives the tax cuts more and more to do: Help the middle class, produce more jobs, keep the same amount of money flowing into the government, and more.
At the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, research fellow Michael Strain says Romney has plenty of tax variables he can adjust.
“There are a lot of different levers to pull here. You have the marginal tax rates, you have the amount of income that’s subject to taxation, you have the amount of income that you can deduct from your gross income to calculate your taxable income,” Strain says.
Is a middle-class tax cut possible with everything else? Strain thinks it is.
“In order to do that, you would have to have a specific plan. And we haven’t seen that from Gov. Romney yet,” he says.
But at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, co-director William Gale says Romney is caught in a bind.
“He has made a set of proposals that are jointly impossible to fulfill. And so something has to give,” he says.
It may be that what’s giving — as Romney told the crowd in Ohio — is the middle-class tax cut.
By: Peter Overby, NPR, October 7, 2012
“The Big Liar’s Biggest Lies”: Mitt Romney Invents Impossible Numbers
“It’s not easy to debate a liar,” complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate – and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).
Yes, President Obama ought to have been better prepared for Romney’s barrage of blather and bull. The Republican’s own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries. Romney executed that pivot on Wednesday night, but he could do so only by spouting literally dozens of provably fraudulent assertions — which various diligent fact-checkers proceeded to debunk.
Knowing that he is vulnerable on taxation and the budget for many reasons, including his own peculiar and secretive tax history, Romney made several contradictory claims regarding his economic plan. He has no plan to lavish $5 trillion in tax breaks on the wealthy. He won’t cut taxes for the rich at all. He vowed to provide tax relief to the middle class and won’t increase their tax burden. He swore that his tax cuts would not increase the deficit.
Finally, he said that with all of that, he would grow the economy enough to shrink and eventually eliminate the deficit — without raising taxes on anyone. And he claimed that there are several studies proving he can fulfill all of these conflicting promises — even though he refuses to provide any specific tax proposals beyond a broad tax cut.
There is no study proving that Romney can do what he promised – and among his lies is his description of editorials in Tthe Wall Street Journal as “studies” of his plan. The most complete and unrefuted study of his claims remains the Tax Policy Center’s bipartisan report on the Romney plan, which shows that there is simply no way to pay for his $5 trillion, across-the-board tax cut without raising taxes on the middle class. None of the alternative studies he has cited proves otherwise – and some of them actually amass additional evidence that he is wrong.
Undoubtedly he knows all that. He knows that eliminating the estate tax, a mainstay of his plan, will benefit the rich enormously and almost nobody else.
He also knows that when he claims economic growth alone will erase the deficit, without raising taxes, he is inventing impossible numbers. As The National Memo’s Howard Hill demonstrated yesterday, the assumptions behind his claims are ridiculous. For the numbers to work, he would have to create not 12 million jobs, as he promised to do by 2016, but 162 million — more than the total current U.S. workforce. Or else the jobs created would have to pay more than $443,000 per year on average — which is even less likely than Rafalca winning the dressage medal at the next Summer Olympics.
At the same time, Romney accused the president of increasing the federal debt by an amount that is “almost as much…as all prior presidents combined.” This charge, which he leveled before, is patently false and by now Romney must know it. The prior debt, mostly run up by George W. Bush and his Republican congressional cronies, stood above $10 trillion when Obama took office. The debt is now just over $16 trillion, mostly due to costs incurred by Bush and by Obama’s successful effort to prevent a Depression.
Having essentially disavowed the health care reforms that were his sole significant achievement in his single term in elected office, the former Massachusetts Governor suddenly claimed ownership of Romneycare. Presumably, this will make him more appealing to swing voters, too. But he still wants to do away with Obamacare, except for the parts that are popular.
For this maneuver, he must misrepresent his own proposed federal health care overhaul. He says there will be no change to Medicare for current beneficiaries, but repealing the Affordable Care Act will deprive them of free preventive care, increase their costs for prescription drugs, and do irreparable harm to Medicaid, which provides assisted care for nine million destitute Medicare patients.
But Romney has been lying about the Affordable Care Act for years, according to his own former advisor Jonathan Gruber, the chief intellectual architect of Romneycare. Nearly a year ago, Gruber complained that Romney’s attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the Massachusetts legislation and Obamacare was phony. He told Capital New York in November 2011 that “they’re the same fucking bill. He just can’t have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it’s the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he’s just lying.”
Lying again? Indeed, the falsehoods flowed on every conceivable subject. Concerning energy, Romney claimed that “about half” of the renewable energy firms that received federal assistance under Obama administration programs went bankrupt — a claim that cannot be justified by any measure. Of the 28 firms that got federal loans or loan guarantees, three went under, representing under 11 percent — and less than 5 percent of the funds committed. (This assertion was so blatantly untrue that the Romney campaign withdrew it the next day.)
The examples cited above hardly exhaust the deep well of dishonesty in the Republican campaign. What Romney has done presents a fundamental challenge to the American political media. Will news outlets hold him accountable for baldly misleading voters? Are they capable of confronting his continuous mendacity with basic facts? Some have made a beginning, while others have scarcely tried. If that isn’t their responsibility, then they no longer have any purpose at all.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 5, 2012
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