By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 7, 2012
“Snuggling Up To Crazy People”: Mitt Romney Crawls Into Bed With Rep Steve King
Today Mitt Romney is experiencing another vicissitude of a campaign that requires a uniformly strong performance across a large landscape of battleground states: it can bring you into close proximity to crazy people in your party. In Iowa, he’s all snuggled up to Rep. Steve King:
At a rally in the most conservative county in Iowa, Mitt Romney enthusiastically endorsed conservative lightning rod Rep. Steve King — prompting the Obama campaign to renew its claim that the Republican supports an extreme social agenda.
“I’m looking here at Steve King,” Romney declared about halfway through his speech. “He needs to be your Congressman again. I want him as my partner in Washington!”
As Team Obama quickly pointed out, King has recently declared himself “open” to Todd Akin’s views about women not being able to conceive if subjected to “legitimate rape,” and has a vast record of extremism on many subjects, particularly immigration and laws against cruelty to animals. King is also a Very Big Dog in Iowa right-wing circles, and is actually in a rare competitive race against Christie Vilsack, so Mitt does not have the luxury of giving him a wide berth. But Democrats will have great sport identifying the two men in parts of Iowa—not to mention other states—where comparing immigrants to dogs while also voting against restrictions on dog-fighting don’t go over so well.
But hey, it gets better! At some point Mitt will almost certainly get to campaign in Florida with Allen West and in North Carolina with Virginia Foxx!
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 7, 2012
“Slippery Fish In The Same Malodorous Kettle”: Mitch McConnell And The Obstructionist GOP Undermine The Economy
In the realm of political strategy, there are two mindsets on the question of attacking the opponent. One frets excessively about how the opponent will respond and how the media will write it up. The other, more aggressive mindset doesn’t worry too much about those things, on the principle that playing offense is almost always better than playing defense. I raise this with respect to the specific question of whether President Obama is going to make attacks on Republican obstructionism part of his arsenal over the next two months. His advisors seem to think that doing so would make Obama look weak. I emphatically disagree, and I think he’ll be dragged into doing it anyway, as he already was. Let’s review the tape.
On Wednesday night, Bill Clinton ripped into the congressional GOP: “[Obama] also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work. Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!” It was then that he delivered that line about the GOP’s message in Tampa: we made the mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so put us back in.
I was elated to hear that obstructionism had made it to the convention podium, and from its best and most authoritative speaker no less. I hoped this meant that it would become a theme. Let me pause in the chronology to say why. It’s simple. The vast majority of the people blame the president for the sputtering economy. After all, he’s the president. They elected him to fix things, so dammit, fix things. Most people’s political analysis doesn’t go beyond this. They think the president can just … do stuff.
Sometimes, the president can. It is certainly true that Obama had a little more than a year, from Al Franken’s swearing in in July 2009 (which gave the Democrats the magic 60 Senate seats) until September 2010 (when Congress recessed to hit the campaign trail) when he should have been able to do stuff. He did health care. But he, and they, didn’t do economy. The idea of stimulus had been so soiled by then that they didn’t have the votes even among Democrats—partly, to be sure, their own fault for mishandling the stimulus argument the first time around.
But for most of his term, especially on the economy, the Republicans blocked everything. Most people don’t understand that 41 votes in the Senate equal an effective majority because of their collective power to stop any action in its tracks, and most people never will. But the fact is that those 41, if they link arms and stand firm, have more power than the president. Indeed: That old chestnut “the president proposes, and Congress disposes” was originally appropriated from the age-old apothegm “man proposeth, but God disposeth.” Congress is God. At least on domestic policy. But try to tell an average American that in the age of the imperial presidency.
Back to the chronology. As I said, I expected to hear Biden and Obama pick up on Clinton’s attack. Neither did, at least in any meaningful way. Obama didn’t mention, for example, his 2011 jobs bill. Ezra Klein wrote yesterday that the Obama team appears to have decided “to refrain from reminding voters how bad things are and to resist using the campaign as an opportunity to continue pushing emergency measures that congressional Republicans implacably oppose.”
Well, I disagree, but OK, if that’s your decision, that’s your decision. But then, the day after the convention, after the poor jobs numbers came out, what did Obama talk about in New Hampshire? GOP opposition to his jobs bill! So which strategy is it?
Obama may not want to remind voters how bad things are, but they don’t need reminding. They know. And given that they know, the smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress. Reality is going to force him to do it anyway.
One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president. Chuck Schumer tried it a couple of summers ago. Other Democrats were just afraid to go there. The White House too. And this was even after Mitch McConnell more or less admitted it in public! It was a classic case of worrying about the how opposition would respond and how the media would cover it instead of just playing offense.
Others say he should just train his sights on Mitt Romney, but I think it’s much stronger to tie them all together. Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket, and Romney’s endorsement of Ryan’s budget, places these slippery fish in the same malodorous kettle. And finally, there is value in simply being seen as fighting. Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around. Yes, it would be incautious. I submit that the time is right for a little incaution.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2012
“Republicans, The Post-Truth Party”: GOP Think’s They Can Get Away With Lying Because They’re Sure They’ll Have Enough Money
The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan’s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.
The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan’s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.
Romney was just as bad, with a rambling rumination on how much he wished Barack Obama’s presidency had “succeeded.” Coming from the man who tried to scuttle Obama’s successful interventions to save GM and Chrysler, and who spent the rest of the president’s first term organizing a campaign to displace him, Romney’s line wasn’t remotely believable.
The Republican Party is not fretting about fact-checkers. Far from it; the GOP has now fully entered the netherworld of post-truth politics, from the wholesale denial of climate change to spreading fairy tales about Obama’s welfare policy (see Betsy Reed, page 4). Romney and Ryan know they’re going to need big lies to win. That’s pathetic, but it could work—especially if the mainstream media continue to evade their basic duty to call the GOP on these whoppers (see Eric Alterman, page 10).
This poses a real challenge for the Democrats, who can’t get bogged down in the minutiae of every Republican lie—there are just too many of them. Democrats must instead go big, and tackle the GOP agenda, which at its core is dedicated to a massive redistribution of power and income toward the 1 percent, who already have more of both than at any time in the past eighty years. The central lie of the Republican campaign is the claim that the wealthiest country in the world is so broke it cannot fund school lunch programs or Pell Grants, but not so broke that it would ask billionaires to pay taxes or put the Pentagon on a diet. The best way to unmask the GOP is not with charts and graphs. It must be done with economic straight talk. We must explain why Romney and Ryan are lying—because their agenda is so unpopular (as well as unworkable and dangerous to the nation’s recovery). And we must offer a vision for job creation, infrastructure investment and an uncompromising defense of the social safety net.
Democrats should not stop there. On the question of campaign finance reform, they’ve made a good start. Obama has joined more than 100 Congressional Democrats in suggesting a constitutional amendment to address the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. These and other Court decisions let corporations and wealthy individuals buy elections with campaign spending that follows no rules and respects no demand for transparency. Obama and the Democrats are hardly pure when it comes to campaign money. But the distinction between the GOP, which has embraced Citizens United, and a Democratic president who would overturn it could not be more stark.
The reason Republicans think they can get away with lying is that they’re sure they’ll have enough money—and enough Super PAC support—to outspend the truth. That’s a scary prospect, best countered with a blunt, unapologetic condemnation of the influence peddlers—and those like Paul Ryan who are most willing to be bought. Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with a similar circumstance in 1936 when, after a difficult first term, he sought re-election as the champion of the great mass of working and worried Americans. Facing the forces of the Wall Street speculators, big bankers and their amen corner in the media who were arrayed against him, FDR didn’t flinch: “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he declared. Barack Obama should be equally blunt about the need to chase the money- changers from the political temple. And, unlike Paul Ryan, he’d be telling the truth.
By: The Editors, The Nation, September 5, 2012
“Truly Transformative”: Why The Stimulus Made America Better Off Four Years Later
President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17, 2009, with the hopes of jump-starting a depressed U.S. economy and initiating his agenda for healthcare, energy, and education. Larger in constant dollars than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Obama’s stimulus is one of the most misunderstood pieces of legislation in U.S. history, says Time journalist Michael Grunwald. The author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era recently spoke to U.S. News about why Republicans were so successful in their campaign against the bill, and why Americans don’t understand how truly transformative it was. Excerpts:
Why did Obama pursue the Recovery Act?
The economy had fallen off a cliff, and in the past, this idea that when the private sector shuts down, the public sector needs to step up was totally uncontroversial. Bush had passed a stimulus bill with overwhelming bipartisan support when the economy started to go soft in 2008. All the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates had their own stimulus plans in 2008. Mitt Romney’s was actually the largest. And House Republicans, including Paul Ryan, voted in 2009 for a $715 billion alternative to the stimulus that was quite similar to President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus. It was never really clear how the Republican plan could be good public policy and how Obama’s pretty similar policy was radical socialism.
While the Recovery Act was partly about recovery, it was also really the purest distillation of what Obama meant when he talked about change we can believe in, in terms of transforming energy, starting to reduce healthcare costs, reforming education with things like Race to the Top, and then the largest infrastructure investments, the largest middle-class tax cuts since Reagan, the largest research investments ever. That’s the new New Deal.
Why does the stimulus have such a bad rap?
First, you have to say that the Republicans did a brilliant job of completely distorting the substance of the bill. They turned this into an $800 billion boondoggle that was full of levitating trains to Disneyland and mob museums and snow-making machines in Duluth and all kinds of nonsense that wasn’t actually in the bill. They’ve been very disciplined and unified in portraying this as just a big mess. This thing was just hard to sell at a time when the financial earthquake had hit but the economic tsunami hadn’t reached the shore. It wasn’t like when FDR took office after three years of depression, so everybody knew it was Hoover’s depression. But Obama took office during a freefall, and January 2009 was the worst month for job losses. And then he passed the stimulus, and then the next quarter was the biggest jobs improvement in 30 years, but it improved from absolutely hideous to just bad, and it’s hard to sell a jobs bill when the job situation is bad.
What was the value of programs that weren’t necessarily shovel-ready?
After a financial meltdown, the recoveries are always going to be long and slow. That’s one reason the money was spread out over several years. Right up front they wrote big checks to states to help governors balance their budgets without doing mass layoffs of public employees and mass cutbacks of Medicaid spending on the poor. Tax cuts went out quickly to get money into people’s pockets. So all that stuff was obviously shovel-ready; you just shovel the money out the door. Then you had some stuff that really wasn’t supposed to be all that shovel-ready at all, like building the world’s largest wind farm or bringing our pen-and-paper healthcare system into the digital age, or building high-speed rail lines. It was always understood that those were going to take longer. The idea was that even if it wasn’t shovel-ready, it was shovel-worthy.
How are Republicans using the stimulus against President Obama?
Republicans had always supported stimulus up until January 20, 2009, and most of what’s in the stimulus were things that had always enjoyed plenty of bipartisan support. Highway spending and unemployment benefits and middle-class tax cuts and even clean energy, but of course Republicans had decided before that that they were in absolute lock-step opposition. They couldn’t have clean bipartisan support. They had to portray him as a radical partisan.
Why should Mitt Romney read this book?
What Republicans can learn from this is that a lot of the things they’ve been trashing as big government nonsense have actually had an effect.
Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?
I think the answer is yes. What people forget is just how catastrophic our situation was four years ago. Gaining 150,000 jobs isn’t that great, but it’s way better than losing 800,000. And that’s always going to be the difficulty for Obama: selling the notion that things could have been worse, and that things were worse.
By: Teresa Welsh, U. S. News and World Report, September 7, 2012
“Hope And Change 2012”: Building On An Existing Narrative With A Forward Vision
The man who ran on hope and change didn’t walk away from them. He redefined them for the long haul.
And a president who has been accused of being a collectivist and a socialist didn’t abandon a vision of shared burdens and purposes. He replied forcefully with a call for a renewal of citizenship, “the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.”
“We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights,” he declared, “that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom that only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
Rarely has an American election been defined by such a sharp clash of philosophies. When Obama told a fired-up Convention crowd that the contest will involve “the clearest choice of any time in a generation” and “a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future,” he was not exaggerating. On Wednesday, he took the Republicans’ new radical individualism head on.
Obama’s was a speech aimed less at shaking up the campaign than in building on an existing narrative. The president did not defend his economic record. He left that to Bill Clinton. He did not even promise rapid recovery. On the contrary, he told voters: “I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick and easy.”
Indeed, he seemed to reach back to John F. Kennedy’s call on the nation to ask not what the country could do for them, but what they could do for the country. “As citizens,” Obama said, “we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating work of self-government.”
And thus his redefinition of hope and change. Faced with assertions that he can no longer inspire the elation he called forth four years ago, Obama challenged those who had supported him to stay in the fight for the longer-term and do the work required for saving their original vision.
“If you turn away now — if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible…well, change will not happen,” the president said. “If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote. . . .”
Of course, this is an election, not a philosophical exercise, so Obama was concrete about his differences with Mitt Romney and the Republicans’ vision of a spare government that would ask even less of the already successful. He criticized his foes on Medicare and Social Security, on their refusal to accept any deficit plans that included higher taxes on the wealthy, on education spending and tuition aid.
“Over and over, we have been told by our opponents that bigger tax cuts and fewer regulations are the only way; that since government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing,” he said. “If you can’t afford health insurance, hope that you don’t get sick. If a company releases toxic pollution into the air your children breathe, well, that’s just the price of progress.”
And he mocked the GOP’s diagnosis of more tax cuts in all economic circumstances: “Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!”
In defining his vision for “moving forward,” Obama spoke more of goals than of policies, highlighting an expansion of manufacturing, energy independence, education and job training, and climate change, an issue that has largely been absent from the public discussion since 2010.
Politicians usually run campaigns based on what they will do, or have done, for voters. Obama will certainly do his share of this, and did some of it Thursday.
Yet his heart seems not to lie in transactional politics. He prefers challenges to promises, obligations to privileges, reason to emotion. “The path we offer may be harder,” he said, “but it leads to a better place.” This is not a typical campaign pledge. It implies neither ease nor comfort but burdens worth bearing and responsibilities worth shouldering. It is still a form of hope, but one that requires far more than going to rallies and cheering.
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 