“Spinning For Dollars”: Romney Campaign Has To Do All It Can To Obscure And Deny Reality
Convention season has been brutal for the Romney campaign. Romney has trailed Obama, not by a lot but significantly, for months; the RNC was supposed to bounce him into the lead. Instead, Romney didn’t get a bounce — but Obama did. It’s far from over, but at this point Obama is the clear favorite to win.
Those are the facts. So why is the Romney campaign spinning furiously in an attempt to deny them? Well, I have a theory; it’s obvious, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere. It’s about the money.
OK, it’s true that part of this may be the carryover from conservative epistemology more broadly, in which truth is what’s ideologically convenient, never mind the evidence. But there’s also a very rational reason to try to pretend that things are going better than they are.
Bear in mind that Romney’s one big advantage is a huge pile of cash. Much of this pile comes from committed right-wing zealots, like the Koch brothers. But a good chunk comes from business interests, Wall Street in particular, that historically try to buy influence with whoever they think will win. They like Romney better than Obama — he doesn’t look at them funny — but they’ve placed a very big bet on the Republicans this time compared with previous occasions, and they have to be feeling nervous.
If they come to the conclusion that they invested in a loser, they will try to cover their position by rushing a lot of cash to Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. And that will blunt the one big advantage Romney still has.
So the Romney campaign has to do all it can to obscure and deny reality, lest perceptions that their candidate is a lemon turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 10, 2012
“Politicians Who Don’t Like People”: The Danger Of Looking At Past Presidents’ Personalities And Extrapolating To General Principles
New York magazine’s John Heilmann makes an interesting point about Barack Obama in this interview (via Andrew Sullivan):
JH: Obama is an unusual politician. There are very few people in American politics who achieve something — not to mention the Presidency — in which the following two conditions are true: one, they don’t like people. And two, they don’t like politics.
KC: Obama doesn’t like people?
JH: I don’t think he doesn’t like people. I know he doesn’t like people. He’s not an extrovert; he’s an introvert. I’ve known the guy since 1988. He’s not someone who has a wide circle of friends. He’s not a backslapper and he’s not an arm-twister. He’s a more or less solitary figure who has extraordinary communicative capacities. He’s incredibly intelligent, but he’s not a guy who’s ever had a Bill Clinton-like network around him. He’s not the guy up late at night working the speed dial calling mayors, calling governors, calling CEOs.
Despite the phrase “doesn’t like people,” Heilmann isn’t saying that Obama is some kind of misanthrope; there’s a whole spectrum of introversion and extroversion. But let’s assume this is a reasonably accurate assessment. Does it matter? You can look at Clinton and say his appetite for schmoozing is in part what made him successful. On the other hand, George W. Bush is a people person too. There’s a famous story about him from when he was pledging DKE in college, and one day they asked the pledges to name as many of their group as they could. Most could only come up with five or six names, but George named all 55 pledges. But you know who else didn’t really like people? Ronald Reagan. He was dynamite in front of an audience, but had few friends and was estranged from some of his own kids. And come to think of it, an unusual number of people who have lost presidential campaigns in recent years (Kerry, Gore, Dole, Dukakis) were skilled at some aspects of politics but obviously tolerated the endless fundraisers and handshaking without actually enjoying it.
Mitt Romney, interestingly enough, doesn’t really like people but tries to pretend that he’s more like Clinton than like Obama. I think this is part of what’s so grating about Romney. It isn’t just that he’s awkward at all the glad-handing politicians have to do. Lots of us (myself included) wouldn’t be any good at that. It’s that he’s awkward at it but thinks he’s convincing us that heloves it. Just can’t wait to get to the next fish fry to sit down and shoot the breeze with the folks. This is probably my favorite Romney video of all time, from his 1994 run for Senate. He comes into a restaurant, looks around at a rather grim group of elderly diners just trying to have a meal, and says loudly to no one in particular, “My goodness! What’s going on here today? Look at this! This is terrific!” It’s beyond painful: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/529289
It does seem that a love of people can be very helpful in becoming president, but it’s far less important once you get to be president. As Heilmann notes, members of Congress were used to getting massaged by Clinton, and they don’t get that treatment from Obama. But would anything in his term have gone better if he had spent more time on that? Legislatively, Obama has been pretty darn successful. He succeeded in one big area where Clinton failed (health care reform). And even Clinton couldn’t have convinced today’s Republicans to be any less obstructionist than they have been.
Maybe this shows the danger of looking at past presidents’ personalities and extrapolating to general principles about what makes for a successful presidency.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 10, 2012
“Arithmetic For Billionaires”: Romney Is Rich, But Can He Add?
Mitt Romney is a very wealthy man with a proven capacity for avoiding taxes – but can he do simple arithmetic?
In the wake of the Democratic convention, the Republican candidate again promised to “cut the deficit and get us back on track to a balanced budget.” He even hinted that his own party bears some responsibility for ballooning federal deficits and debt. “We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time and for a while we didn’t do it. When we had the lead, we let people down,” he said the other day, presumably referring to the last Republican president, whose name must never be mentioned, and the Congressional leadership during that administration.
And “for a while” presumably refers to the past 30 years or so.
Romney also says that he watched none of the speeches at the Democratic convention. He obviously missed the one that might have helped him figure out exactly what his party has been doing wrong. “I hear Bill Clinton spoke for like, 50 minutes?” he snarked at a public appearance on Friday. Yes, the former president spoke for just over 49 minutes – and he articulated a message that could enlighten Romney. Clinton’s lesson might be titled “Arithmetic for Billionaires.” He could start with an accurate assessment of the origins of the national debt level currently carried by the U.S. Treasury. As Clinton noted, the federal debt roughly quadrupled during the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration, from just under a trillion dollars to four trillion.
When Clinton became president, that debt was rising rapidly with annual deficits of $400 billion. His first budget raised taxes, almost entirely on the wealthiest taxpayers, by restoring a top bracket of 39.5 percent. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for that 1993 budget, with many of them predicting that raising taxes on the rich would result in economic catastrophe. They were wrong, of course.
The economy boomed, incomes rose at every level, millions began to climb out of poverty, and the rich became richer too (although many of them never forgave Clinton for demanding that they pay up for the festivities of the Reagan era). Clinton booked four balanced budgets and began to pay down the national debt. The debt would have been paid down entirely, preparing the nation far better for the crash that we ultimately faced, had that unnamed Republican not succeeded Clinton with reckless tax cuts and extremely expensive wars.
By the time President Nameless left office, the nation was deeply in debt and on the brink of a catastrophe that wasn’t merely rhetorical. Now along comes Romney, with his sidekick Paul Ryan, telling voters that they will cut the deficit and balance the budget. Yet as Clinton noted, they propose still another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest households – including their own and those of their most generous supporters – that would cost the Treasury at least $5 trillion. And they insist on increasing the defense budget by hundreds of billions, too.
What Clinton asked is how the Republican nominees propose to pay for those lavish favors to themselves and their friends. Doing the arithmetic himself, he came up with three possible answers: They will raise taxes on the middle class by taking away mortgage, charitable and other deductions, so that billionaires can have another tax break. They will cut federal spending so deeply that infrastructure, education, science, technology, and health care will be ruined for the future. Or they will do nothing, and explode the debt, just as their predecessors have done repeatedly over the past three decades.
Whether in their own 40-minute addresses to their party convention or elsewhere, neither Romney nor Ryan has offered a plausible solution to Clinton’s arithmetic problem. They talk about spending cuts and tax reform, but without any specifics. The footnote to their budget claim says only, as Clinton put it: “See me about that after the election.” Clearly the Republicans intend to push off difficult questions about their budgeting, just as Romney intends to push through without releasing his tax returns. But those evasions may prove very difficult to sustain through the four upcoming debates.
Sometime before November 6, someone will ask Romney and Ryan to do the arithmetic.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, September 8, 2012
“Dual Eligible’s”: Cut Medicaid And You Cut Health Care For The Elderly And Disabled
Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan have been adamant that their Medicare proposals won’t affect people over 55. That may be true. But their Medicaid proposals sure will. A lot of health care for the elderly comes from Medicaid. We call those people “dual-eligibles”, because they qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid. Some dual-eligible are younger disabled people, but about two-thirds are 65 or older. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports:
Dual eligibles as a share of total Medicaid enrollees ranged from a low of 10 percent in Arizona and Utah to a high of 26 percent in Maine, due to demographic differences and policy preferences across the states. Similarly, spending on dual eligibles as a percentage of total Medicaid spending ranged from a low of 18 percent in Arizona to a high of 59 percent in North Dakota.
Lots of Medicaid money goes to the elderly. Cut Medicaid, and you likely cut some of that. Here’s more:
One quarter (25%) of Medicaid spending for dual eligibles went toward Medicare premiums and cost-sharing for Medicare services in 2008. Five percent of spending for duals was for acute care services not covered by Medicare (e.g., dental, vision, and hearing services). Another 1 percent of Medicaid dual eligible spending was for prescription drugs, a percentage that has fallen significantly since coverage for nearly all prescribed drugs for duals was shifted from Medicaid to Medicare Part D in 2006. The remaining 69% of Medicaid spending was for long-term care services, which are generally not covered by Medicare or private insurance.
That Medicaid money is going to Medicare premiums! It’s also going to actual care. Cut Medicaid, and you likely cut some of that.
It’s about time someone pointed that out. The health care proposals of Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan will absolutely impact some elderly people way earlier than a decade. Unless they’ve changed their minds again.
By: Aaron Carroll, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 7, 2012
“Inevitable Desperation”: The Ugliness Of The Republican Death Spiral
Democrats should not be complacent. The 2012 elections are not yet won, and we soon will find out just how much half a billion dollars of Koch and Rove Super PAC money can buy. But things are looking good, particularly for President Obama. But Democrats still need to work as hard as if they were behind, right up through election day. And Democrats need to hold on to the Senate and win back the House. Unlike Republicans, Democrats can’t buy elections. Unlike certain prominent Republicans, Democrats actually know they can’t buy dignity and class.
When the radical judicial activists who comprise the extremist majority on the current Supreme Court went well beyond the questions raised in Citizens United, to legislate from the bench an end to campaign finance reforms, the purpose was obvious. These same justices had either ruled on or come to the Court as a result of the equally radical Bush v. Gore decision, and in both cases the real intention was to undermine democracy, to protect a power elite that needs such cynical and sinister machinations in order to maintain its death grip on political power. Do not be surprised if these extremists make further moves before the election, because laws specifically designed by Republicans to prevent legally registered Democrats from voting have been overturned by lower courts, and these perversions of the very concept of “justices” are running out of means by which they and their allies can prevent democracy from breaking out.
The Republican National Convention was such a moiling morass of mendacity that even the usually cautious arbiters of national discourse in the traditional media couldn’t help but notice. Paul Ryan’s speech to the Convention was a catalogue of lies. Clint Eastwood’s bizarre performance included his deluded hallucination of President Obama as a man who tells people to shut up, which clearly is nothing remotely akin to the president’s actual personality or behavior, and in fact was a clear projection of the unprecedented disrespect with which the president has been treated by the Republicans themselves. And then came Mitt Romney, with yet another catalogue of lies.
The Romney-Ryan campaign is built almost entirely of lies. We expect some degree of dishonestry in politics, but it usually takes the form of fudging around the edges. With Romney and Ryan it is the very basis of their campaign. The primary theme of the Republican attacks on President Obama is based on a quote taken deliberately out of context. And perhaps even worse, that theme not only is based on a lie about President Obama, it is based on lies about Romney himself. He did not build Bain by means of honest hard work and enterprising spirit, he built it with government subsidies. He did not rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics by using the principles of free market capitalism, he rescued it by using crony capitalist government subsidies. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney built a health care system he now wants people to forget, and he ranked only 47th in the nation in job growth.
As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research pointed out, Republican criticism of President Obama for the condition of the economy is akin to criticizing firefighters for the condition of a house right after the firefighters had stopped it from burning down. When President Obama took office, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. When President Obama took office, the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 8.9 percent. The economy was burning down. Then the firefighters arrived. The Obama stimulus created some 3,300,000 jobs. Under President Obama’s stewardship, the economy has recovered all private sector job losses. The only justifiable criticism of the stimulus is that it wasn’t large enough to have sparked a full recovery, but that’s not the Republican criticism.
Republicans continue to oppose stimulus spending. Republicans oppose any potential stimulus by the Federal Reserve. In other words, Dean Baker’s analogy didn’t go far enough. It’s not just that the Republicans are criticizing the firefighters for the condition of the house right after the firefighters saved it from burning down, it’s also that the Republicans lit the firein the first place, tried to stop the firefighters from getting to the house, and now aretrying to stop the construction workers from getting to the work of rebuilding it, while themselves planning to add more fuel and light another match.
Mitt Romney has never built anything on his own. He has used government subsidies and money given to him by his wealthy family— the latter an option he apparently is too oblivious even to realize is not available to everyone. He criticizes President Obama for disparaging private enterprise, even though President Obama did no such thing, and then he claims credit for having made lots and lots of money after having lots and lots of money handed to him for nothing, which he doesn’t acknowledge because he apparently believes he was entitled to it by the mere fact of his existence. But Romney is just one among many failed Republican candidates, his triumph in the Republican primaries but more proof that while money can’t buy class, it can buy a Republican presidential nomination. His opposition was a dystopian carnival of human degradation, and if anyone ever wondered why Republicans refuse to accept the scientific proof of evolution it now is clear that it is because evolution has passed the Republicans by. The Republican National Convention featured many of the supposed rising Republican stars of the future, who only succeeded in collectively demonstrating that any ostensible Republican future is but a fantasy of a mythological past from which most sentient beings long since have awakened to consciousness.
The Republicans have no future. From climate change to national security to the economy to social justice and human rights, the list of issues on which the Democrats and public opinion are moving forward while the Republicans are stagnating if not attempting to move backward is endless. They can’t win on the issues. They can’t win on their freak show personalities. They can’t win using the principles of democracy and republic. The only hope for the Republicans is to lie, cheat and steal, and they are attempting exactly that. And to a party that now is habitually and congenitally opposed to basic scientific realities, lies aren’t incidental to their political strategies, they are in fact the basis of their world view. To a party that is openly bigoted against the diverse demographics that the rest of the nation not only celebrates but has become, voter suppression and the undermining of democracy isn’t but a political means to an ends, it is the inevitable desperation of the soon-to-be extinct. Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution an end to democracy itself.
The Republicans are dying. They may still have means to stave off their final end for a few election cycles, but demographics, evolution and history itself are working against them. Death throes are not pretty. Desperation can breed cruelty. The smaller the souls, the uglier and more destructive will be their final flailing flagellations.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, September 9, 2012
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