By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 24, 2012
“The New Elite Aristocracy”: Mitt Romney’s Wealth Problem
Americans have come to expect a certain patrician baseline from their political class. Congress is stocked full of millionaires, and in the 2008 campaign Joe Biden was considered working class for riding Amtrak, despite having a net worth in the hundreds of thousands. No one bats an eye now when Rick Santorum whines about his meager means on the debate stage then releases tax returns revealing that he rakes in over $900K a year.
Yet, Mitt Romney’s wealth has served as an albatross to his campaign. We might be used to millionaires running for president, but Romney would rank among the richest handful of presidents if elected. His vast fortune is more than double the total worth of the past eight presidents combined. Newt Gingrich played on resentments of Romney’s wealth to great success in South Carolina before dialing back his attacks once the Republican establishment turned on him, accusing the former speaker of employing leftist critiques of capitalism.
Romney’s campaign has danced around the issue throughout the campaign, but over the weekend TPM‘s Pema Levy noticed a new strategy emerging from Romney and his friends:
On Friday, Romney had another one of his out-of-touch moments when he said that his wife Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” But rather than try to walk back the comment, team Romney appears to have a new tactic for dealing with this problem.
When Romney and a surrogate were asked about Ann’s Cadillacs on the Sunday talk shows, their response was not to hide or apologize for Romney’s wealth. Instead, their message boiled down to: Yes he’s rich, get over it.
When questioned about the line on Fox News, Romney said, “If people think there’s something wrong with being successful in America then they better vote for the other guy.”
Mitt Romney wants to have it both ways. He sees himself as the fulfillment of the American ideal; the personification of the 1% that many middle class Americans believe they will one day reach, even if upward social mobility is increasingly difficult.
Yet, Romney also presents himself as attuned to the travails of normal working folks. He calls himself unemployed, claims to have once worried about receiving a pink slip, and litters his stump speeches with folksy tales of his normal upbringing (leaving out the years spent in a governors mansion) and starting his own, typical small business.
While the two personas appear to be at odds, Romney could get away with the contradiction if his wealth had been earned through other means. The self-made millionaire is a bedrock part of the American tale. But Romney’s struggles are as much about how he accumulated his vast fortune. Private equity is a largely unknown sector of the American economy, and its mysterious practices have a whiff of the under-the-table financial Wall Street instruments that brought economic ruin to the country. Romney earned most of his $21 million 2010 income, not from direct earnings, but from gains accrued off his investments. Rather than exemplifying the entrepreneurial spirit Americans love, the continued growth of Romney’s bank account highlights the divide between the normal working class and the new elite aristocracy whose fortunes continue to rise based on their already accumulated wealth.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, February 27, 2012
“The Quality Of Civic Debate “: The GOP’s Radioactive Anti-Obama Rhetoric
The debates this presidential primary season have been less like Lincoln-Douglas than former heavyweight champ Buster Douglas — punch-drunk pugilism, providing entertainment and some great upsets along the way.
But for all the excitement of the fights, there is a civic cost to the radioactive rhetoric that gets thrown out to excite the conservative crowds.
It’s not just that the most irresponsible candidates can play to the base and get a boost in the polls, while more sober-minded candidates like Jon Huntsman fail to get attention. The real damage is to the process of running for president itself. Because when low blows get rewarded, the incentive to try to emulate Lincoln — holding yourself to a higher standard — is diminished. And one barometer of this atmospheric shift is in the increasingly overheated rhetoric by candidates attacking the current president. This serial disrespect ends up unintentionally diminishing the office of president itself.
Look, I know that politics is a full-contact sport: Elbows get thrown and egos get bruised. But ask yourself if Ronald Reagan ever called Jimmy Carter a socialist or a communist on the stump. Sure, there were deep philosophical and policy disagreements between them, and Carter was called a failed president many times. But there was a lingering respect for the office that retained an essential bit of dignity. It was only the far-right fringe who indulged in the kind of rhetoric we now hear routinely from presidential candidates.
For example, Newt Gingrich gained steam early in the primary process by accusing President Obama of having a “Kenyan anti-Colonial mindset,” and invoking the specter of a “Obama’s secular socialist machine.” As a highly compensated historian, Newt should have known better than to say that Obama is the “most radical president in American history.” But then accuracy — or even aiming in the general vicinity of the truth — isn’t the point.
Rick Santorum raised eyebrows this past weekend for saying Obama wants to impose a “phony theology” on America. Santorum has since tried to clarify that he was not trying to raise doubts about the president’s religion and I’ll take him at his word. Likewise, when Santorum compares GOP primary voters to members of the “greatest generation” called to act against the rise of Nazi Germany, I’ll assume that Santorum isn’t intentionally comparing the president to Hitler.
But a month ago, when a Santorum supporter accused Obama of being “an avowed Muslim” who “constantly says that our Constitution is passé” and “has no legal right to be calling himself president” — Santorum did nothing to correct her.
Instead, he told CNN: “I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them.”
But I think standing up for the truth in the face of unhinged hate is part of a potential president’s job. So did John McCain.
Four years ago, at the height of the general election, when a supporter called then-candidate Obama an “Arab,” McCain corrected her. He said, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man … (a) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.” That’s the voice of a loyal opposition, putting patriotism above partisanship.
Even the sober-minded Mitt Romney has gotten into the hyper-partisan pandering game lately. Maybe he’s trying to compensate for a lack of enthusiasm on the far-right with red meat rhetoric, but the effect is desperate.
For example, when Mitt was barnstorming through Florida, a standard part of his stump speech was this: “Sometimes I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.” This line was straight out of the “Alien in the White House” playbook, a riff that reinforced the worst impulses of some in the audience, as one woman at a Romney rally named Katheryn Sarka eagerly reaffirmed when I asked her what she thought of the line: “Obama doesn’t understand America. He follows George Soros. Obama is against our Constitution and our democracy.”
After his big Nevada win, this line of Mitt’s scripted victory speech stood out: “President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.” Romney knows this isn’t true, but he’s been convinced that it works and he seems to be willing to say whatever it takes to make the sale.
Here’s what’s most troubling about this trend: It doesn’t seem remarkable anymore. For the candidates and many in the press, it is just the new normal, the cost of doing business. The overheated rhetoric simply reflects the conversation that’s been going on at the grassroots for a long time.
Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, we don’t realize that the heat is killing us until it is too late — except that the casualty here is the quality of our civic debate and the bonds that are bigger than partisan politics.
It’s naïve to think it will stop when Mr. Obama is no longer president, whether that is in one year or five. Because the next Republican president will inherit the political atmosphere that’s been created and find that it is almost impossible to unite the nation absent a crisis. Some Democratic activists will no doubt take a tactical page from recent conservative successes. This cycle of incitement — where extremes inflame and empower each other — will make our politics more of an ideological bloodsport and less about actually solving problems.
Perspective is the thing we have least of in our politics these days. But perspective is what the presidency is all about — rising above divisions and distractions to make long-term decisions in the national interest. By pouring gasoline on an already inflammatory political environment, the GOP presidential candidates not only diminish themselves, they diminish the process of running for president, and make it less likely that they would succeed in uniting the nation if they actually won the office.
By: John Avlon, CNN Contributor, CNN Opinion Page, February 22, 2012
“Defending Traditions And Storied Principles”: The Demonizing Of Barack Obama:
February is African American History Month. Yet these are days of sadness.
The brilliance of hope, so blinding a few short years ago, has dimmed. The dreams of a 21st-century America, where achievement is based on skills, determination and merit, free from an arbitrary color standard, have been replaced with injuries inflicted by present-day haters as malevolent as some of our worst enemies of the past.
Who could have imagined a U.S. publication suggesting that Israel “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place.” In case you were unsure of what you’d just read, the writer clarified, “Yes . . . order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.”
Those words were written only a few weeks ago, in a column by the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1925. Andrew Adler’s call for President Obama’s assassination was immediately condemned by major Jewish organizations. He apologized, resigned from his post and has reportedly put the paper up for sale.
But it can’t be unsaid. To read in a mainstream publication that Barack Obama should be killed takes the breath away.
How many other Americans think the same way? Such thoughts didn’t start with Adler. They don’t stop with him.
Now, before some of you strike back with, “Hey, what about those scurrilous attacks on George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan?,” allow me to stipulate that crazed partisans and venomous pundits populate the left as well as the right.
What sets anti-Obama foes apart from the persecutors of Bush, Reagan et al., however, is that the purveyors of this brand of inflammatory rhetoric include the GOP presidential candidates themselves.
Their charges are rude, disrespectful and designed to question Obama’s loyalty to country and commitment to his faith.
John Avlon, CNN contributor and senior political columnist for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, recently chronicled the kind of “radioactive rhetoric” that the presidential hopefuls are spewing to rev up their conservative base. I’ve chosen a few examples of my own.
Newt Gingrich: Obama has a “Kenyan anti-colonial mindset” and is the “most radical president in American history.” Gingrich has also said: “This is an administration which, as long as you are America’s enemy, you’re safe. You know, the only people you’ve got to worry about is if you are an American ally.”
Rick Santorum: Obama has “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible,” and he is “systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian values of America.”
Mitt Romney: Obama associates with people who have “fought against religion.” “Sometimes,” Romney said recently, “I think we have a president who doesn’t understand America.”
As Avlon observed: “This line was straight out of the ‘Alien in the White House’ playbook, a riff that reinforced the worst impulses of some in the audience.”
In this political environment, there is no invective too repugnant, too vicious to throw at this president of the United States.
It is in this climate that we celebrate African American History Month and the achievement of generations against all odds. The demonizing and denigration of the nation’s first black president cast a pall over what should be a time of tribute to indomitable Americans.
But we soldier on.
African American History Month concludes next week, and George Washington University will host an event Tuesday “celebrating the African American legacy in Foggy Bottom.”
Since the discussion will be devoted to my old turf, I expect to be on hand. “Half the fun of remembering is the rearranging,” as an Internet posting put it, and this trip down the avenues of yesterday should be worth taking, even if it returns us to things that were hard to bear at the time.
It is the present, and what lies ahead, that is unsettling.
How will observers of African American History Month many years down the road regard the time in which we now live?
Ah, but these things are being said about Obama, we are told, because of his policies, not because of the color of his skin.
It’s never about race; it’s all about the defense of great traditions and storied principles . . . as in cases of the Civil War, Plessy, Brown, lunch counters, bus travel, the poll tax, Jackie Robinson.
It’s sad, and infuriating.
“Not As Radical But Just As Ridiculous”: Mitt Romney’s Tax-Plan Flim-Flam
Well, it was about perfect, wasn’t it, that Mitt Romney gave his big economic speech before about 1,200 supporters in a 65,000-seat football stadium? Whether the stadium or the speech was emptier is the obvious question of the moment. Pathetic as the pictures of the event were, I’d have to hand the trophy to the speech. Some of Romney’s specifics weren’t as far out there as those of his opponents. His proposed individual marginal tax rates, for example, are radical, but not as radical as those announced by the remaining three other Republican candidates. But his plan is even worse than theirs are in a way that we’ve come to know as typically Romneyesque. He is desperately eager to please the right wing and also to try to seem like the responsible one, but there is no way to do both of things without lying.
First, though, let’s discuss that venue. So a hotel ballroom was oversubscribed. Okay, I know Detroit has been down on its luck for the better part of 40 years, but even so I find it pretty difficult to believe that there is not a venue in the whole metropolitan area that has a capacity somewhere in between the Westin Book Cadillac ballroom’s 1,000 or whatever and Ford Field’s 65,000 (for football; 80,000 for wrestling). The University of Detroit’s basketball teams, for example, must play somewhere. Reports indicate that the Economic Club of Detroit, not the campaign, made the switch. But someone at the campaign said, “Gee, okay!” It’s not a catastrophe, but it is staggeringly stupid. Imagine the field day the right-wing agitprop machine would have had in 2008 with Barack Obama doing something like that. Indeed remember the sport they made of the mere fact of Obama giving a speech in a football stadium, even after he did in fact fill it.
But the deception involved in trying to make 1,200 supporters seem like 80,000 is nothing next to the deception of the plan itself. Romney would lower all six current individual tax brackets by 20 percent. That’s not as drastic as his opponents’ plans. Newt Gingrich, for example, would let any taxpayer choose between paying under the current regime or just paying a 15 percent flat tax. Rick Santorum would have most taxpayers paying just 10 percent. So this is the Romney-the-Reasonable part of the plan. Sticking with six brackets is supposedly meant to signal that he believes in a little stability and is not a loon.
Reducing those rates, of course—along with the reduction of the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent; along with massively increasing Pentagon spending—will reduce revenue. And here’s the catch, via The Wall Street Journal’s write-up. Romney “said Wednesday that as president, he would direct Congress to make up lost revenue from the rate cuts by limiting deductions, mostly for wealthier Americans. Mr. Romney and his aides didn’t say which deductions would be targeted.”
Ah! There it is. Deductions? We’ll figure those out later. Listen, I have a new fiscal plan for the Tomasky household that I am announcing today. I’m going to go half-time at the Beast and quit doing all my other work, thereby reducing my income by well more than half. But circumstances dictate that I also need to buy a new car, and a nice car, a Lexus, because this household needs a husband/father who isn’t ashamed to be a Tomasky and is prepared for the future because the roads can get awfully dangerous out there in Montgomery County. How will I pay for it, you ask? Well, first of all, you’re a freedom-hater for even asking the question, and second, I’ll simply cut all other household spending to the bone. I’ll end up revenue neutral, I swear.
Romney’s plan is literally about that serious. He won’t announce which deductions because it’s really hard to go after deductions, and because there is probably not enough money there anyway to make up for the lost revenue. But trust him, it’ll all work out.
And here’s a curious thing. Romney commits a grave error, from the right-wing point of view, in even acknowledging that there is lost revenue. If he’d gone to the Mitch McConnell School of Economics he’d know that cutting tax rates increases revenue. So the really interesting question here is: Why does Romney even bother to acknowledge that there will be lost revenue that will need to be made up?
He acknowledges it because some small but quickly vaporizing part of the man still retains some attenuated grasp of fiscal reality. So rather than tell the balls-out, red-meat lie that reduced rates will raise more revenue, he tells the squishy and weasely lie that he’ll take care of the imbalance at a future unspecified date in some future unspecified way. And that, my friends, is Romney to the core. He thinks he can finesse everything, that he’s much cleverer than he is, that somehow people won’t notice. But no one’s buying his line about the bailout. It’s patent nonsense, and Steve Rattner just demolished it on the Times op-ed page today. Romney also looks a little graceless, by the way, saying that he drives the Mustang and the GM pickup, while his wife drives the Cadillacs, plural. The way he added that after a pause, it reminded me of John McCain not remembering how many houses he owned. But Romney remembers. He just thinks he can bluff it.
He makes me really wonder about the private sector in this country. Did he earn all those millions behaving this way, telling people what they wanted to hear, then maybe doing something else entirely, then saying to them that that was his plan all along, then jovially throwing a colleague under the bus? Don’t answer that question.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2012
“Drop Dead”: Republican Presidential Candidates To Rape Victims
I wrote Monday night about the emerging conservative war on women’s sexuality, and it looks like I was on to something. At Wednesday’s GOP debate in Arizona the Republican candidates for president competed to be the most vociferous in their opposition to reproductive health and freedom.
CNN’s John King read a viewer-submitted question about whether the candidates support birth control and why or why not. The audience immediately booed, because they hate when their candidates are forced to expose their extremism on social issues. In recent weeks all the Republican candidates have all volunteered their opposition to making contraception available, specifically with regard to the Obama administration’s requirement that employer provided health insurance cover it. But somehow asking about that is considered unfair. “You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide,” complained Gingrich. when in the Illinois State Senate. You’ll be shocked to know that Obama never actually voted for infanticide but rather for protecting doctors who complete abortions when the fetus shows “signs of life” from unfair prosecutions.
But we already knew Gingrich was prone to cheap demagoguery; Gingrich makes a hypocritical attack on “elites,” the media or the “elite media,” in every debate. What we don’t get to see as often is just how inhumane the Republican candidates all are on women’s health.
King noted that Gingrich and Rick Santorum have criticized Mitt Romney for having signed a law requiring hospitals, even Catholic ones, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims when he was governor of Massachusetts. If Romney were a decent person, this would be an easy question to answer. He would say, “Of course any institution in our society that purports to care for the sick must provide contraception to rape victims.” But Romney isn’t running for decent person, he’s running to be the Republican nominee for president.
And so Romney defensively insisted he would never have dared tell anyone to provide contraception to a rape victim. “There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their report. There was no such requirement.”
Think a little bit about what this means: a woman who is violently raped and has no control of which hospital she is taken to, or who lives near only a Catholic hospital, will be forced to carry her rapist’s fetus.
The even greater irony, of course, is that this woman who does not want to be forced to carry her rapists’ fetus will end up getting an actual abortion, not using the morning after pill, which Gingrich falsely characterized at the debate as a kind of abortion.
Santorum and Gingrich were not in the least bit embarrassed to have been referenced opposing contraception for rape victims. Indeed, they pressed the point. “The reports we got were quite clear that the public health department was prepared to give a waiver to Catholic hospitals about a morning-after abortion pill, and that the governor’s office issued explicit instructions saying that they believed it wasn’t possible under Massachusetts law to give them that waiver,” said Gingrich.
“If you voted for Planned Parenthood like the senator [Santorum] has, you voted for birth control pills,” noted Ron Paul. “And you literally, because funds are fungible, you literally vote for abortions because Planned Parenthood gets the money.”
That’s an easy argument for Paul to make because Paul opposes the federal government providing any health services. For a big government anti–sexual freedom conservative such as Santorum, though, it poses a conundrum. Santorum’s response was that he opposes federal spending on contraception (through a law called Title X), but knowing he couldn’t get rid of it settled for trying to balance it with abstinence education.
As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding, but it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including the funding for the National Institutes of Health, the funding for Health and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It’s a multibillion-dollar bill.
What I did, because Title X was always pushed through, I did something that no one else did. Congressman Paul didn’t. I said, well, if you’re going to have Title X funding, then we’re going to create something called Title XX, which is going to provide funding for abstinence-based programs, so at least we’ll have an opportunity to provide programs that actually work in — in keeping children from being sexually active instead of facilitating children from being sexually active. And I pushed Title XX to — to accomplish that goal.
You’d think voting for contraception, which helps reduce the number of abortions, would be unobjectionable. But Republicans think it’s so immoral that Romney actually accused Santorum of being insufficiently anti–reproductive freedom:
Senator, I just saw a YouTube clip of you being interviewed where you said that you personally opposed contraceptives but that you — you said that you voted for Title X. But you used that as an argument, saying this is something I did proactively. You didn’t say this is something I was opposed to; it wasn’t something I would have done. You said this — you said this in a positive light, “I voted for Title X.”
God forbid. The intellectual honesty award goes, as always, to Paul. Being an ObGyn, Paul had to point out that Gingrich was lying when he referred to the morning after pill as an abortion. “Actually, the morning-after pill is nothing more than a birth control pill… you can’t separate the two. They’re all basically the same, hormonally,” said Paul.
So, naturally it follows that Republicans who don’t want hospitals to provide birth control don’t want them to offer the morning-after pill either. That should teach those slutty trollops not to get raped, right?
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, February 22, 2012
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