“All The Explanation You Need”: Mitt Romney, The Most Mysterious Man In The Election
It’s often said that the way a candidate runs his campaign gives insight into the way he’ll run the government, but unfortunately it usually isn’t true. A campaign has a few similarities to a government, but not many; likewise, while there are similarities between running for president and being president (lots of speeches, for instance), most of the really important things couldn’t be more different.
As the presidential election nears its end—a vote of tremendous consequence preceded by a campaign of unusual triviality—is there anything left to learn about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Despite the fervid hopes of those on the extreme right that there is some secret revelation waiting to be unearthed about Obama, we know most of what we need to know about his potential second term just by taking stock of his first. We know that domestically, where he needs Congress’s cooperation he’ll pursue the policies his party supports, just as Mitt Romney will. In foreign policy and national security, we know that he’ll continue to distress the progressives who care to think about it, with a continuation of the drone war in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a vision of presidential power that is little different from George W. Bush’s. The bulk of his policy initiatives will merely continue what he has already done; whether you think that’s a good idea depends almost entirely on your party affiliation.
If you had particular foresight, you might have seen in Obama’s pre-presidential political career some of the characteristics that produced his greatest successes as president. In particular, he combines a carefulness and methodical planning with extremely bold action when he believes circumstances have produced the perfect moment. The most obvious example was his decision to run for president in the first place. Let’s not forget that at the time, nearly every sage observer said Obama was being presumptuous and premature. When his run began he was a mere two years removed from the Illinois state senate, an electrifying presence but hardly possessed of the seasoning that a president needed. But Obama saw that the end of the Bush years provided an opportunity he might not see again, when the thirst for someone new and different made the election of the nation’s first black president a possibility, even one who had only occupied high office for only a brief time.
There have been plenty of times when Obama could have gone farther than he did, or would have done better forcing a confrontation instead of settling for conciliation. But that boldness could be seen at most of the key moments of his first term: ignoring advisers like Rahm Emanuel who counseled abandoning the Affordable Care Act when it was in jeopardy; bailing out the auto industry when many thought it was a dying elephant; and yes, ordering the operation that killed Osama bin Laden despite all the risks it entailed.
Like Obama, Mitt Romney is known as a careful planner. But unlike Obama, Romney has shown an aversion to risk-taking that is nearly absolute. That isn’t always a bad thing; though many of Obama’s risks have worked out well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with caution. But Romney’s caution is extreme, so much so that it’s impossible to think of a single risk he’s ever taken—political, personal, or otherwise. When he was working at Bain & Co. and the firm’s founder asked him to run the new venture of Bain Capital, Romney negotiated a deal that guaranteed him his old job back if the private equity firm failed. When he went to run the Olympics in Salt Lake, he negotiated a similar deal with Bain Capital. And the private equity business that he helped pioneer is all about risking borrowed money and making sure to charge huge management fees, so even if the company you buy goes under, you still wind up making a profit.
In politics, Romney’s aversion to risk is all the explanation you need for his reinventions: When the next electorate to be wooed didn’t look favorably inclined to the last iteration of Mitt, rather than risk being rejected because of what he stood for, he sought out the path of least ideological resistance. The problem is that if he becomes president, Romney will face decisions in which there is no safe choice. I don’t doubt that if a natural disaster hit, Romney could effectively manage the government’s response, since it would be an administrative challenge with clear goals. But what about some international crisis where all paths pose tremendous risks? What if, say, fundamentalists staged a coup in Pakistan? Can anyone say how Romney would respond, or even what in his character or experience might give us some idea? He might handle such crises brilliantly or disastrously. We have no idea.
Nevertheless, for all Romney’s ideological revisions and reimaginings, we can be fairly sure about many of the things he’ll do. Just like Obama, he’ll be a creature of his party. He’ll stock the executive branch with the same Republicans who would arrive with any GOP president. He can’t enact his tax cut plan as he has presented it during this campaign, but he’ll attempt to cut income tax rates in some fashion, and probably try to cut capital gains and inheritance taxes to boot. He’ll appoint judges (and Supreme Court justices if he gets the chance) who are hostile to reproductive rights and friendly to corporate power and privilege. When he promises to cut regulations that limit business’s ability to pollute or harm consumers, he means it. While he may not achieve his utterly arbitrary goal of increasing military spending to 4 percent of GDP, he’ll certainly try to increase it. He might get cold feet on voucherizing Medicare, but he’ll be happy to go after Medicaid; doing so is less risky since the latter’s constituency is poor people.
Finally, if we’re trying to imagine the next four years, it’s as important to ask what each candidate doesn’t care about as what he does care about. A president won’t take a political risk or invest in a long-term effort to accomplish a goal he can live without achieving. Obama wouldn’t have undertaken the monumental struggle required to pass the Affordable Care Act if he didn’t care about the goal of health care reform. On the other hand, he clearly doesn’t care much about the proliferation of guns.
As for Mitt Romney, it’s so hard to determine what he cares about that it’s equally difficult to say what he doesn’t care about. His campaign recently informed reporters that he will be giving no more interviews between now and Election Day, lest he be subjected to the risk of an uncomfortable question or another cringe-inducing gaffe. So whatever voters don’t know about Mitt Romney they aren’t going to find out unless he becomes president.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 29, 2012
“Mitt Romney’s Halloween Tricks”: In This Season Of Trick Or Treat, The Emphasis Is Definitely On The Trick
All Hallows’ Eve is upon us, but not in its ordinary annual form. Instead we’re in the midst of the quadrennial version where an implacable army of hollow-eyed zombies—political junkies—consumes each day’s latest poll numbers like so many handfuls of candy corn. Voters, especially in swing states, endure what must seem like a waking nightmare of endless negative campaign commercials.
In this season of trick or treat, the emphasis is definitely on the trick.
Consider, for example, the costume that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has been running around in all month: Ever since the first presidential debate in Colorado, the self-described “severely conservative” pol has been parading around as Mitt the mild moderate.
That was never more starkly on display than Monday night during the foreign policy-focused presidential debate. He had spent most of his campaign growling out neoconservative rhetoric about American exceptionalism aimed at obscuring the fact that he had few if any substantive policy differences with the president. (“It sounded like you thought that you’d do the same things we did, but you’d say them louder and somehow that—that would make a difference,” Obama needled him Monday.) But wearing his “moderate Mitt” costume on Monday, the GOP nominee changed his tune—he tried to out-peacenik the president (“We can’t kill our way out of this mess”) when he bothered trying to express any differences at all. His parade of agreements with the president made one wonder whether he shouldn’t have just worn an Obama mask out onto the stage.
And it wasn’t just his previous national security rhetoric he hoped to Etch A Sketch out of public memory. Romney continues to fight a rearguard action against his own written and spoken words about the auto bailout. He and Obama got into a heated exchange about his November 2008 New York Times op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” A seemingly indignant Romney declared that “the idea that has been suggested that I would liquidate the [auto] industry, of course not. Of course not.” Of course not, indeed—Romney didn’t advocate liquidation; he simply advocated a course of action that would have led to liquidation. It’s true that his op-ed contemplated the federal government providing guarantees, but they were for “post-bankruptcy financing.”
But at the time the companies needed more than post-bankruptcy federal guarantees; they needed cash to get them through the process, and that money wasn’t going to come from the private capital markets in late 2008 or early 2009. It was either taxpayer money or nothing. And that Romney clearly opposed. “There’s no question but that if you just write a check that you’re going to see these companies go out of business ultimately,” Romney told CBS News then in a video clip turned up this week by the Huffington Post. Later, during the Republican primary portion of his never-ending campaign, he railed against the policy. “My view with regards to the bailout was that…it was the wrong way to go,” he said during a 2011 debate.
Romney’s opposition to the bailout was easy. It was popular. But now it’s dogging him like a cheap slasher-flick monster that he can’t seem to kill, “moderate Mitt” guise or no. It has probably doomed him in Michigan and it may well prove his undoing in Ohio, which seems likely to decide the election.
This despite another trick which is proving a treat for Republicans: the myth of “Mitt-mentum.” The first debate undeniably gave Romney’s effort a jolt and helped him capitalize on a race that was already tightening. But with Obama winning the latter two debates, the race has seemed to stabilize into a walking dead heat. However that hasn’t stopped the Romney campaign from very visibly assuming the posture of a group coasting to an inexorable victory.
This has ranged from explicit gamesmanship (“…for the first time in six years, Romney folks E-mailed, ‘We’re going to win,’ ” Politico‘s Mike Allen reported in his “Playbook”) to subtler head faints meant to signal strength. See, for example, last week’s announcement that the GOP was pulling resources (which proved to be a single staffer) out of North Carolina to drip-drip-drip discussion of maybe, possibly re-entering Pennsylvania. “If Romney acts and speaks like a landslide is on the way, perhaps he can create the atmospherics he needs for a small and meaningful win,” Politico‘s Alexander Burns reported this week. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait and Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall have pointed out, this is a classic campaign-closing bluff last seen in 2000 when Karl Rove had George W. Bush doing a pre-election victory lap in California with an eye toward creating momentum through buzz.
And to some extent the current Romney bluff is working. Asked Wednesday at an Aspen Institute event who is winning, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter said that if “you look at the news coverage and you look at the data…you get two different answers.” The news narrative, she said, is one of an “ascendant” Romney with the “momentum.” But the data—state by state polls, for example—tell a different story. “The underneath numbers suggest that it’s still Obama’s race right now, that fundamentally he has got the edge in the Electoral College.”
Fables of Rom-mentum haven’t managed to crack that electoral lock yet. Neither has Romney’s transformation back into a moderate wiped away the damage he did to his electability during his conservative phase. But he still might solve that problem—and that’s the scariest Halloween news of all.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 26, 2012
“Unclassified Sensitive Crap”: Rep. Darrell Issa Defends Potentially Endangering Libyan Lives
The Republican politicization of the Benghazi attack may have endangered the lives of several Libyan nationals. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, released 166 pages of documents [PDF] on Friday as part of his investigation into the Obama administration’s response to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack.
That evening, Foreign Policy reported that the documents contained unredacted names of several Libyans working closely with the United States government. In an interview with Rogin, an Obama administration decried Issa’s action as endangering the lives of those named:
“Much like WikiLeaks, when you dump a bunch of documents into the ether, there are a lot of unintended consequences,” an administration official told The Cable Friday afternoon. “This does damage to the individuals because they are named, danger to security cooperation because these are militias and groups that we work with and that is now well known, and danger to the investigation, because these people could help us down the road.”
One of the cables released by Issa names a woman human rights activist who was leading a campaign against violence and was detained in Benghazi. She expressed fear for her safety to U.S. officials and criticized the Libyan government.
“This woman is trying to raise an anti-violence campaign on her own and came to the United States for help. She isn’t publicly associated with the U.S. in any other way but she’s now named in this cable. It’s a danger to her life,” the administration official said.
Among others named in the document were a port manager working with the U.S. to improve infrastructure, as well as various militia members and commanders who share information on other armed groups within Libya. Top Democrats, including Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Dick Durbin (D-IL), have slammed Issa for the document dump.
Rep. Gerry Connoly (D-VA), who also sits on the Oversight Committee, likewise issued a statement saying, “The irony is that while Chairman Issa purports to be sincere in his desire to investigate the recent attack so that we can learn how best to protect our diplomats in the future, his own actions have now compromised the safety of U.S. personnel and Libyans working together to forge a better Libya.”
This is not the first time that the Oversight Committee’s Republican majority has possibly exposed sensitive information in the course of their investigation into Benghazi. During the Oct. 10 hearing, Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) may have revealed the classified location of a CIA safehouse while viewing an unclassified map.
Issa defended himself and his committee’s actions in a statement last night:
“President Obama should be ashamed of yet another example where his administration has been caught trying to mislead the American people about what happened in Libya,” Issa said in a statement Sunday night. “Obama administration officials and their surrogates are clearly reeling from revelations about how the situation in Benghazi was mishandled and are falsely politicizing the issue in a last ditch effort to save President Obama’s reelection effort.”
“I applaud the bravery of this activist and other Libyans who are willing to speak publicly and work in positions that puts them in regular contact with diplomatic officials,” Issa added. “They deserve better than to have the Obama administration parade them out as part of their election campaign strategy to distract Americans from legitimate questions about the handling of security and the response to a terrorist attack.”
As a spokesman for the Oversight Committee pointed out on Friday, the documents were not classified. However, the Executive Branch has a multitude of designations related to security. The best known are documents that are ‘classified’, be they SECRET or TOP SECRET, with various other interlocking levels of compartmentalization past that. These levels indicate the amount of potential damage to the United States’ national security their release would have and ensure that they remain closely guarded.
Unclassified documents also can receive labels that advise their level of ability for distribution. For example, the documents released by the Government and Oversight Committee were labeled “unclassified, but sensitive,” meaning that while their contents would not harm the United States directly, they are not intended for wide release.
Rep. Issa has been quoted, according a partial transcript released by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), as referring these unclassified designations as “crap.” Those whose names were published would likely argue otherwise.
By: Hayes Brown, Think Progress, October 22, 2012
“Protecting National Security”: Ann Romney Thinks Mormon Missions Are Just Like Military Service
Thursday morning, Mitt ducked a scheduled performance on The View (more on that later), leaving his wife Ann Romney to represent the candidate’s views on those pesky “women’s issues” like abortion rights and military service.
Her answer on the latter question is turning some heads.
When pressed by Whoopi Goldberg on how Romney would explain why neither he nor any of his five sons served, Ann explained that the six men found “different ways of serving” by going on their Mormon religious missions.
“So, you know, we find different ways of serving,” she said. “And my husband and my five boys did serve missions, [but they] did not serve in the military.”
The substitution, she went on to explain, makes sense because the two share essential, character-building and altruistic values.
“I sent them away boys and they came back men. And what the difference was — and I think this where military service is so extraordinary too — is where you literally do something where you’re helping someone else. You’re going outside of yourself and you’re working and helping others. And that changes you,” she said.
The exchange began when Goldberg mistakenly asserted that Mitt Romney hadn’t served in Vietnam because it was against his religion. Goldberg’s statement was, to be fair, a clear misinterpretation of Mormonism (which is not at all a CST version of Quakerism), and Anne Romney quickly corrected her.
“That’s not correct,” she said pointedly. “He was serving his mission, and my five sons have also served missions.”
To set the record straight, Mormon missions are voluntary, non-violent trips focused on proselytizing about the Church of Latter Day Saints. Men begin their mission — which lasts for two years — at 18 or 19 years old. This month, the Church decided to allow women to begin their mission — which lasts for 6 to 18 months — as early as 19, down from the previous age of 21. The missionary practice is credited as one of the main reasons that the LDS Church is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States and in Central and South America. If Mormonism shares anything with U.S. military, then, it may be that both facilitate the exportation of Western cultural values across the globe.
Some veterans, however, are not so happy to hear the prospective First Lady equate a voluntary religious mission aimed at growing your religion with the sacrifice of serving in the U.S. military in the name of protecting American national security.
“Between my husband and I, we have a collective 10 years in the army. My husband was in Iraq in 2004, and I went to the Pentagon after 9-11. I am deeply offended by Ann’s comments. How can she believe her son’s missions could even begin to compare to our service? Not to mention those we served with who came home in body bags …” wrote a commenter on a discussion forum for those who have left the Mormon Church.
Meanwhile, as Ann was on The View, Mitt Romney made a surprise appearance at the meeting of a Colorado Political Action Committee — also known as a campaign funding PAC.
The group, the American Conservative Union, boasts of being one of the oldest conservative organizations in the country. It champions a mission statement that asserts “collectivism and capitalism are incompatible” … “our inherent rights are endowed by the Creator … [which] can remain secure only if government is so limited that it cannot infringe upon those rights” … and “the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties.” (Either the statement of principles hasn’t been updated, or next week’s foreign policy debate is going to be considerably more exciting than anticipated.)
Romney’s appearance on The View had been widely anticipated since he admitted at a private fundraiser that he was nervous about sitting down with the “non-conservative” and “sharp-tongued” women. This comment, along with the now infamous 47 percent comment, was recorded in a secret video leaked by Mother Jones.
Too bad Romney ended up having “scheduling problems” Thursday morning.
By: Laura Gottesdiener, Alternet, October 20, 2012
“Chain Of Command”: Hillary Clinton Takes Responsibility For Libyan Tragedy, Republicans Explode
For weeks, Republicans have been trying to turn the 9/11 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi into a scandal. They’ve claimed the president refused to acknowledge that the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others was terrorism, though he called it an “act of terror” the day after the tragedy. They’ve accused the White House of rejecting calls for more security that came from the embassy in Tripoli.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stepped into the fray to clarify the situation.
“I take responsibility,” she told CNN. “I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world (at) 275 posts. The president and the vice president wouldn’t be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals. They’re the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision.”
This clear statement of chain of command has activated Republicans’ Clinton hysteria to a level that hasn’t been seen in years. They’ve said she was falling on her sword and taking a grenade for the president, who defeated her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who often blurs the line between blogger and campaign spokesperson, responded offensively. She tweeted, “First Bill humiliates her and now Obama does.. Hillary no feminist, more like doormat.”
When Obama advisor David Axelrod tweeted, “Sick. Mitt mouthpiece jumps shark,” Rubin responded: “So is Obama going to hide behind her skirt Tuesday night? Why would the president let Hillary end her career in disgrace?”
Apparently taking responsibility for something that is actually your responsibility is a “disgrace” to Republicans.
Evidence suggests that the Bush administration ignored several warnings leading up the 9/11 attacks and the only administration official who ever took responsibility and apologized for not preventing them was Richard Clarke, a holdover from the Clinton administration.
Rudy Giuliani said that Republicans “should be exploiting” this tragedy to make a case against President Obama. Now that this plan is failing, they’ve returned to the same old sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 16, 2012
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