“Romney’s Carter Delusion”: Mitt’s Acceptance Speech Perfectly Tailored For An Opponent He’s Not Running Against
There’ve been indications lately that Mitt Romney’s campaign no longer believes it will be enough to depend on widespread economic anxiety for a November victory – that too many swing voters like Barack Obama too much and are too willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because of the catastrophe he inherited.
If this is the Romney team’s new thinking, the speech the GOP nominee delivered last night didn’t reflect it. It was perfectly scripted for a candidate who is confident that the basic dynamics of the race favor him and who sees boldness, specificity and unforced errors as his main obstacles on the road to the White House.
I’ve written before about Romney’s desire to function as a generic candidate, someone likable and competent enough to swing voters who are inclined to vote out President Obama and who lacks any sharp edges that might give them pause. His acceptance speech was as broad and formulaic as this strategy. As Jonathan Bernstein put it:
Everything in it was perfunctory: the biographical section (which was weirdly interrupted by a digression into Neil Armstrong and the space race and by a call-out to every elected Republican woman they could scrape up — the whole thing seemed to have a case of attention deficit disorder); the five-point economic program; the foreign policy section; the stirring rhetoric at the end; and, certainly, the delivery.
Probably the most telling passage came when Romney invoked Ronald Reagan’s famous “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” line:
That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: “you are better off today than you were four years ago.” Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.
This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office.
Let’s give Romney a pass for not mentioning George H.W. Bush, who flunked the “better off” test in 1992 and was drummed out of office with the lowest share of the popular vote of any president since Taft. This was a Republican convention, after all, and Romney has a warm personal friendship with the 41st president. But in calling attention to Carter’s defeat, Romney seemed to indicate that he shares a common view among Republicans about the 2012 race: that it’s a repeat of 1980.
Optimistic Republican voices have been making the claim a lot lately that, just as they were 32 years ago, swing voters are fed up with the incumbent and itching to fire him, and that’s needed from the opposition party is a modicum of reassurance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made this case to National Journal just a few hours before Romney’s speech:
“I’m not predicting a blowout like we ended up having in ’80,” McConnell said in an interview. But the mood strikes him as similar. It’s an atmosphere “in which people really don’t think the guy’s done a very good job, and the Democrats are betting on our candidate being inadequate.”
The speech Romney delivered is the speech that a candidate who believes he’s running against another Carter would deliver. The problem for Romney and Republicans is that the 2012-as-1980 model doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny.
The first problem is that Obama is much more popular as he seeks a second term than Carter was. At this point in 1980, it was common for polls to show Carter with an approval rating in the low 30s, or even in the 20s. And his party was bitterly divided. His initial victory in 1976 had been something of a fluke – he’d understood the ramifications of the Democrats’ radically expanded primary calendar better than anyone else and snuck to the nomination without the support of many of the party’s traditional leaders and interest groups – and he’d alienated huge chunks of the Democratic coalition by governing from the center-right on many domestic issues. This gave rise to Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge, which likely would have succeeded had it not been for the sudden Iran hostage crisis at the end of 1979. As it was, Carter limped to renomination with a majority of his own party saying they disapproved of his presidency.
This just isn’t the case for Obama, whose average approval ratings sits at 47.7 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. That’s hardly enough to guarantee him a second term, or even to make him the clear favorite, but it gives him a fighting chance and puts Obama more in the category of George W. Bush in 2004 – not Carter in 1980. Moreover, Obama’s own party is squarely united behind him. He’s never had a serious problem with his own base, and his approval rating among Democrats consistently clocks in over 80 percent.
The other problem with the ’80 comparison, as John Sides detailed earlier this month, is that Carter actually trailed Reagan throughout that year, sometimes by significant margins. Yes, Carter managed to tighten the race after his party’s August convention, when the Kennedy challenge was extinguished once and for all and many (but not all) of his supporters reluctantly returned to the Carter fold, but Reagan led in the vast majority of polls conducted in 1980. The reason the race isn’t generally remembered that way is that there was a strong sense at the time among the political class that Reagan was far too extreme to win a national election – that his Goldwater-style conservatism would somehow catch up with him and erode his lead before Election Day. But it never did.
Again, Obama is in demonstrably better shape on this front than Carter was. In the wake of the debt ceiling debacle last year, Romney briefly pulled ahead of Obama in polling, but since last October, the president has consistently led in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
The speech Romney gave last night would probably be more than enough to topple a president as weak as Carter. But he’s not running against Carter.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, August 31, 2012
“Empty Chair, Empty Promises”: GOP Convention Fails At Principal Political Goal
Going into the Republican Convention, Mitt Romney had one major political mission: to convince swing voters that he isn’t just the guy who fired their brother in law – that he understands their lives and is on their side.
Given his record as Governor of Massachusetts – 47th among the 50 states in job creation – and his history at Bain Capital – Romney can’t really make the case he has any experience creating jobs.
But the thing that really stands between Romney and swing voters is the perception that he has zero empathy – no comprehension of what life is like for everyday Americans.
So the Republicans tried very hard to tell stories that humanized the otherwise robot-like Romney. But here is the bottom line: when multiple speakers have to testify how authentic you are – you’re not.
The first night of the Convention did feature Ann Romney delivering a simple message: you like me, I love Mitt – so he must not be so bad.
But it also featured a cast of Governors doing auditions for 2016 – saying very little about Romney – and a great deal about their own “successes”. When Chris Christi gave the Convention’s Keynote address he didn’t even mention Romney until the very end of his speech.
Night two featured Paul Ryan whipping up the right wing base and delivering brazen lies about the Obama record. Ryan’s speech was a feast for fact checkers. From his assertion that Obama failed to prevent the shutdown of the GM plant at Janesville – which was closed before Obama took office – to his attack on the Obama for failing to take seriously recommendations from the Debt Commission which he himself voted to oppose.
Most egregious was Ryan’s claim that ObamaCare “cut” Medicare by over $700 billion. In fact, of course, far from “cutting” Medicare benefits, ObamaCare actually improved Medicare benefits and achieved $700 billion of savings for the Medicare program by cutting huge overpayments and subsidies to big insurance companies. Not one Medicare recipient has had his or her guaranteed benefits cut by ObamaCare – and Ryan knows it.
Of course, all the while Ryan was lying about the fake “ObamaCare” cuts in Medicare, he and Romney are planning to eliminate Medicare. They have made clear they want to replace it with a voucher program that would provide a fixed amount of money per person and require that seniors shop for coverage on the private insurance market. Their plan will raise out of pocket costs by $6,400 and eliminate the guaranteed benefit that defines Medicare and has meant that American retirees haven’t had to worry about their health care costs for over half a century.
The final night of the Convention, the Republicans made a concerted effort to “humanize” Mitt Romney. They put up a string of former friends and associates to tell stories aimed at trying to make him seem more caring and human.
Then, Bob White, the Chairman of Romney for President, and former Partner in Bain Capital talked about his business experience. White told the story of how Romney was asked to come back from Bain Capital and return to Bain Consulting to save it from collapse. Of course White ignored the fact that, as a new article in Rolling Stone indicates, he achieved that recovery through a federal bailout.
The essential role of the government, by the way, is a consistent, though never mentioned, theme that continued when it came to Romney’s “turn around” of the Salt Lake Olympics that receive a larger federal subsidy — $1.3 billion – than all of the previous Olympics combined.
Then came Tom Stemberg, the CEO of Staples, that had been funded by Bain Capital who argued – in one of the stiffest, least “everyman” speeches ever – that when the Obama campaign contends that Romney is out of touch with ordinary people, “they just don’t get it”. In fact, Tom led the assembled delegates in the chant: “they just don’t get it”. Multi-millionaire Tom Stemberg is a strange choice to serve as cheerleader for how Mitt Romney understands ordinary people.
Ray Fernandez, the owner of Vita Pharmacy, who told everyone how important Bain Capital was in creating his business, followed Stemberg. By this time the Convention was beginning to sound like a business development seminar.
Then came Kerry Healey, Romney’s former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts, to tell us about Mitt’s Massachusetts record. No mention of the three quarters of a trillion dollar increase in fees on everyday people. No mention of the fact that on his watch Massachusetts was 47th out of the 50 states in job creation. No mention of RomneyCare. No mention that his policies increased student class sizes, or that when he left office, Massachusetts had the highest debt per capita in America.
Next was Jane Edmonds, Romney’s former Massachusetts Director of Workforce Development, who testified to Romney’s “authenticity”. Edmonds went on to argue that Mitt believed in promoting women – particularly to “senior” positions. No mention of his refusal to endorse laws that would require equal pay for equal work.
Edmonds tried to convince us that Romney was not one of those leaders who “focused only on his own success” – but rather would work hard – selflessly — to make life better for other people. Now there is a tough sell.
Then came Olympic athletes to testify about how Romney turned around the Salt Lake Winter Olympics. Forgot to mention those Federal subsidies.
There were videos and home movies. Romney saying that when he traveled a lot, he would call home and find Anne exasperated from five active little boys. Caring guy, he told Anne: “Just remember that what you’re doing is more important than what I’m doing.” Really?
After the videos, we were treated to a “surprise” guest — Clint Eastwood — who argued that the Obama Administration failed to do “enough” to eliminate unemployment. Clint forgot about the fact that when Obama first took office, he confronted the worst economic disaster in 60 years. He forgot that Obama staunched the loss of 750,000 jobs per month that had resulted from the failed trickle down policies of the Bush Administration and that Mitt Romney hopes to revive. He forgot about the last 29 consecutive months of private sector job growth — over 4 million jobs – and, most importantly, forgot that the Republicans in Congress have done everything they can to sabotage the economy including refusing to pass the American Jobs Act that independent economists say would have created another million plus jobs.
Then Eastwood rambled through a bazar, awkward dialogue with a faux Obama during the first fifteen minutes of live primetime network Convention coverage. His presentation will be the most talked about event of the convention. And the Republican Party put out a statement distancing itself from Eastwood’s strange presentation just minutes after the Convention adjourned.
When Eastwood finally withdrew, Florida Senator Marco Rubio introduced Romney recanting stale rightwing bromides – whipping up the Republican hard core. Never a mention of the need for immigration reform, or the fact the Mitt Romney vowed to veto the Dream Act, and is the most anti-immigration candidate for President that of a major party in modern history.
Finally, came Romney – stiff and awkward as ever. Touting his record at Bain as a “great American success story”. Once again he blamed Obama for presiding over the “worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.” Let’s remember that the policies that he and Paul Ryan want to reinstall in Washington – tax cuts for the rich and letting Wall Street run wild – caused this economic catastrophe. Romney reminds you of an arsonist complaining that the fire department hasn’t done a good enough job putting out the fire. And in the course of his speech he never offered one idea to create jobs other than reinstating the failed Bush economic program.
Romney went on to attack the Obama foreign policy – apparently forgetting about his own recent disastrous foreign policy tour.
But most importantly, Romney did nothing to “Etch-a-Sketch” his image of the out of touch, prep school educated, son of a corporate CEO.
At the close of this Convention the most memorable stories that everyday people remember about Mitt Romney the person still have to do with a dog strapped to the roof of his car, or the way that, as an 18 year old, he led a gang of teenagers to bully another student. The most memorable facts about Mitt Romney remain that fact that he “likes to fire people” and did exactly that as CEO of Bain Capital.
Mitt’s convention fell short in its attempt to convince everyday Americans that he understands who they are and how they live and that he’s on their side. That is one of the major reasons, that those ordinary Americans will not elect him President of the United States.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, August 30, 2012
“We Did Build That”: The GOP Identification Of Self Worship With Virture
I was pretty much focused on the speeches in Tampa last night, and less on the videos and other trappings, and so didn’t write about the overarching theme of “We Did Build That.” It was, as the New York Times’ Bill Keller noted, pretty odd to see a retort to something Barack Obama actually never said become the dominant theme of the convention dedicated to ousting him from power.
But the one honest thing about this theme and its power among conservatives is the righteous indignation it arouses. Wealthy people, and even some not-so-wealthy people often become furious at the suggestion that their “success” is not purely and simply a tribute to their moral superiority and hard work. The flip side of this calculation, of course, is that people who aren’t so successful are not so virtuous and/or are lazy. When Virtuous Republican Businessman was putting in that extra hour of labor, Lazy Democratic Looter was asleep, or having sex, or doing something else unvirtuous. Or so goes the mythology.
This identification of “success” (i.e., wealth) with virtue, ancient as it is, has always laughably defied common human experience. The hardest working people on earth are those who are literally working to keep from starving. Relatively few of them live in the United States to begin with, and those who do are rarely Republicans. And pride over one’s “success,” particularly if it is expressed via conspicuous wealth, has been the target of stern warnings in virtually every major religious tradition.
It has taken many decades of laborious revisionist work for the devout, scripturally literalist adherents of the faith whose God and Savior was quoted as saying, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God,” to become uninhibited enthusiasts for earthly success and wealth, and despisers of the “undeserving” poor. It’s the same revisionism, of course, that makes it possible for the Roman Catholic Vice Presidential Nominee of the Republican Party to fondly view Ayn Rand as an “intellectual influence,” instead of someone whose books any Christian should abjure like a Black Mass—someone whose fondest desire was to wipe both religion and altruism from the face of the earth.
But such thoughts do not seem to trouble the delegates in Tampa, for whom Paul Ryan is their true leader for decades to come, their very own Ronald Reagan.
I’ve spent a lot of my life around the non-college educated white voters who seem to be the only “swing voters” the GOP is concerned about at the moment, and while a lot of them do indeed tend to “kick down” and resent the “undeserving poor” they view as too lazy to work, they don’t automatically admire the very wealthy—their own bosses, for example—as paragons of virtue. So I suspect this whole “We Did Build That” theme is basically for the emotional benefit of the GOP base and its donors. It says a lot that at a National Convention their hurt feelings must be so lavishly propitiated. And it is about “hurt feelings,” as TNR’s Leon Wieseltier suggests in his savage takedown of Paul Ryan and his intellectual pretensions today:
It is no wonder that Ryan, and of course Romney, set out immediately to distort the president’s “you didn’t build that speech” in Roanoke, because in complicating the causes of economic achievement, and in giving a more correct picture of the conditions of entrepreneurial activity, Obama punctured the radical individualist mythology, the wild self-worship, at the heart of the conservative idea of capitalism.
“Self-worship” is an apt term for people who have all the material abundance anyone could hope for in this life, but still burn with resentment at the “lucky ducky” working poor who don’t have federal income tax liability, and are insulted at the very idea that they owe something back to their community. I hope they enjoyed their evening of self-congratulation last night. To mention another saying by Jesus Christ with respect to self-regarding “godly” folk: “They have received their reward in full.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 29, 2012
“The Secret Weapon Is Us”: You Didn’t Build It, Mitt Romney, We All Did
The Republican National Convention opened by smacking President Obama with the theme “We Built it.”
To pound that message, Republicans turned to a Delaware businesswoman, Sher Valenzuela, who is also a candidate for lieutenant governor. Valenzuela and her husband built an upholstery business that now employs dozens of workers.
Valenzuela presumably was picked to speak so that she could thunder at Obama for disdaining capitalism.
Oops. It turns out that Valenzuela relied not only on her entrepreneurial skills but also on — yes, government help. Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, documented $2 million in loans from the Small Business Administration for Valenzuela’s company, plus $15 million in government contracts (mostly noncompetitive ones).
In a presentation earlier this year, Valenzuela described government assistance as an entrepreneur’s “biggest ‘secret weapon.’ ”
Someone has set up a parody Web site, using the name of Valenzuela’s company, First State Manufacturing, to mock the Republican message. The site, FirstStateManufacturing.com, declares, “Thank God government was there for me.”
In short, the Republicans are inadvertently underscoring the point that President Obama was expressing in his “you didn’t build that” comment in July. Obama noted then that “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” He pointed to public investments in roads and bridges that enable businesses to flourish, and then he inelegantly added, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
Fox News erupted in outrage, selectively editing the clip to confirm Republican prejudices that Obama doesn’t understand the private sector. This fits into the Republican narrative that business executives are heroic job creators when they aren’t held back by regulations and taxes imposed by quasi-socialist Muslims born in Kenya.
Democrats tried to highlight a flaw in that narrative when they released a new ad pointing to Mitt Romney’s outsourcing of jobs and telling him, “You didn’t build that — you destroyed it.”
Yet to me, that Democratic line of attack on Romney as a serial job destroyer feels unfair. Sometimes the way to save a company is to cut labor costs or outsource jobs, and almost nobody wants to ban trade or overseas production even though they can cost jobs.
What is fair is to observe that the Republicans’ claim that they are the great job creators is a fiction.
Prof. Robert S. McElvaine of Millsaps College examined employment data for the 64 years from the beginning of Harry Truman’s presidency to the end of George W. Bush’s. He found that an average of two million jobs were created per year when a Democrat was president, compared with one million annually when a Republican was president.
More pointedly, and unfortunately for Romney, business executives have only a mediocre record when transferring their skills to government. In the last great economic mess, this country was led by a Republican who had been stunningly successful in business: Herbert Hoover. Hmm. More recently, President George W. Bush staffed his cabinet with C.E.O.’s who had been stellar in the private sector — and that didn’t work out so well, either.
Obama’s point about our shared undertaking was made last year, more eloquently, by Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for Senate:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody!” she said. “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you all were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. …
“You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
In short, taxes don’t just smother. They can also fuel growth — when they’re invested in highways or the Internet, in colleges or early childhood education. They can create opportunities, as they did for Sher Valenzuela.
Or for Romney himself. He built his Bain empire partly because he was smart and hard-working, but also because of a great education and because of tax breaks for debt financing. Tax loopholes helped him build his fortune, and other loopholes gave him the low tax rates to retain it.
If the Republican convention wishes to highlight and explain Romney’s success, it should have a moment of silence to honor our infernal tax code.
Who built this country? Entrepreneurs, yes. But so did schoolteachers and railway construction workers. Doctors and truckers. Scientists and soldiers. You didn’t build it, Mitt Romney — we all built it.
By: Nicholas D. Kristoff, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 28, 2012
“The Ghosts Of Dixie”: In Modern GOP, The Old South Returns
The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’s day. In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.
No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180. Founded as the party of the anti-slavery North and committed to deep governmental involvement in spurring the economy (land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railway), today’s GOP is the negation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. It is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.
The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988. Consider the Romney campaign’s ads falsely attacking President Obama for gutting welfare reform. “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” proclaims one such commercial. “They just send you a welfare check.” Obama’s plan, as several media fact-checking monitors have noted, does nothing of the sort. The spot clearly seeks to resurrect the kind of resentment of African Americans that the GOP exploited back in the days when welfare was a major program. The Romney campaign has evidently concluded, since virtually its entire pool of potential voters is white, that it must rouse the sometime voters among them with such expedients — which explains why it is running more of these ads than any others.
In the anti-government column, the Ryan budget, which House Republicans enthusiastically adopted, would cut taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and halve the share of spending on every domestic, non-entitlement program. It would decimate education, transportation and funding for college students and scientific research. It would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore.
The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trial and the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it.
What’s remarkable is not that a significant number of Republicans harbor these beliefs but that these beliefs have come to dominate the party. Veteran politicians of the more pluralistic GOP that was around as recently as half a decade ago, including Orrin Hatch and Romney himself, have had to repudiate their past as thoroughly as China’s communist apparatchiks did during the Cultural Revolution. An empiricist? Not me, buddy.
But how is it that the South has come North in today’s GOP? The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.
That party is meeting in Tampa this week. Cut through its self-justifying rhetoric and we’re left with a GOP whose existential credo is, “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.” The rest, as the sages say, is commentary.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 28, 2012
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