“Specifics Please”: Joe Biden Calls Paul Ryan Out On Repeated Falsehoods
What a difference a week makes. In the first presidential debate, President Obama let Mitt Romney’s attacks on him stand, and seemed disengaged. Vice President Joe Biden stayed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s face for the entirety of Thursday’s vice presidential debate. In the process, he forced Ryan, and by extension the Romney campaign, onto the defensive for a large part of the evening. Obama has a lot to be grateful for.
Last week, Romney repeated over and over that the president’s health care bill cut $716 billion. Obama didn’t push back much to explain that the cuts came from providers and insurance companies, not beneficiaries. This week, Ryan was forced again and again to answer for his voucher/”premium support” approach to Medicare, which Biden hammered at relentlessly.
Last week, Romney flatly denied he had proposed $5 trillion in tax cuts. This week, Ryan had to keep dodging the question of what middle-class deductions would have to be eliminated to pay for the tax cuts. The moderator, Martha Raddatz, who effectively challenged both candidates throughout the debate, at one point turned to Ryan and asked: “No specifics again?” The discussion revived an issue Obama badly needs in play.
And Ryan made a major mistake in defending his past support for privatizing Social Security. Last week, Obama made a mistake of his own when he said that his position and Romney’s on Social Security were similar, thereby closing off a matter that has always been a Democratic staple. The Republicans should have let things sit right there. Instead, Ryan brought the privatization issue to life. His standing his ground on his Social Security ideas (rather than simply saying that Romney had no plans to move in that direction) will allow the Democrats to add Social Security to Medicare in their arsenal of issues they hope to use to cut Republican margins among seniors.
Biden was hot, avuncular, occasionally sarcastic, and always engaged. He laughed a lot, and never let a point slip. I am certain that the cheers in Democratic living rooms around the country were as loud as the sighs of relief. That alone was vital to Obama. Demoralized Democrats themselves contributed to the story line of Obama’s failure in the first debate. The days of demoralization are over.
Some will no doubt write that Biden was too hot and overreacted to Obama’s disengagement. But this misreads the net impact of the debate, which was to renew the doubts about Romney, Ryan and their approach that were hurting the GOP before the last debate. Biden stayed on Romney’s class bias from the beginning to the end — he was not shy, as Obama was, about mentioning Romney’s 47 percent comments. A Romney presidency, Biden said, would concentrate on “taking care only of the very wealthy.”
Ryan probably did himself some good with his conservative base, and he generally preserved his cheerful demeanor. The debate will help advance his chances for a 2016 Republican nomination if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses this year. But his main tasks on Romney’s behalf were to keep the momentum from last week’s debate going and to keep the campaign colloquy focused on Obama’s weaknesses. In this, he failed. The news is likely to shift again toward the problems with Romney’s ideas, and with Ryan’s own. A particularly revealing moment was Ryan’s heartfelt defense of his staunch opposition to abortion. It was an honest answer that will keep him in good stead with conservatives, but it almost certainly hurt Romney, who has been trying to soften his stance on the subject.
In 2004, after John Kerry’s clear victory over George W. Bush in the first presidential debate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney came out on top in most of the commentary about his encounter with John Edwards. Cheney thereby slowed Kerry’s momentum. Dick Cheney has never been Joe Biden’s role model, but Biden’s imperative Thursday night was the same as Cheney’s eight years ago. And with a very different style, he achieved the same result. It will now be Obama’s task to pick up where Biden left off, but the vice president clearly brought his president back to a much better place.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., The National Memo, October 12, 2012
“Make Up Another Lie”: What To Do When A Talking Point Gets Taken Away
Every day for months, the attack on President Obama was the same: the unemployment rate is above 8 percent, so voters have no choice but to consider him a failure — no matter how severe an economic catastrophe he inherited.
This changed on Friday when recent gains pushed the jobless rate to 7.8 percent, the lowest rate in four years. Obama is now overseeing the best election-year improvement in unemployment figures since Reagan’s “Morning in America” re-election bid in 1984.
If you’re a Republican, what do you do? As it turns out, there are two schools of thought.
The first is, keep repeating the attack anyway, even though it’s no longer true. Restore Our Future, the Republican super PAC, expanded an ad buy this week in three swing states describing the jobless rate as “over 8 percent.” Karl Rove’s American Crossroads attack ad shows viewers an 8.1 percent unemployment rate, rather than the actual one.
Why let facts and good economic news get in the way of a perfectly good attack?
The second is the one adopted by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: move the goalposts. The Republican presidential hopeful is now arguing, “[I]t looks like unemployment is getting better, but the truth is, if the same share of people were participating in the workforce today as on the day the president got elected, our unemployment rate would be around 11 percent.” Ryan said the same thing this week.
Like far too much of Romney’s rhetoric, this is wildly misleading:
[The charge] assumes all things are equal in the labor force, when in fact it is constantly churning and evolving. In particular, besides the aftermath of the Great Recession, the composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.
Our colleagues at WonkBlog explored this issue earlier this year, showing that the peak of the labor force participation rate, or LFPR, was reached during the end of President Bill Clinton’s term and that since then it has been on a downward track…. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in March estimated that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the labor force participation rate was explained by long-running demographic patterns, such as the retirement of the baby boomers.
In other words, Romney/Ryan would have you believe the sharp improvement in the job market doesn’t count because of demographic trends. That’s marginally better than simply repeating false and out-of-date attacks, but there’s no reason to take the GOP rhetoric seriously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 10, 2012
“Moderate This”: Mitt Romney Is Talking Out Of Both Sides Of His Mouth
So Moderate Mitt Romney told the editorial board of the Des Moines Register yesterday that he had no interest in promoting anti-abortion legislation as president:
“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.
But by executive order, not by legislation, he would reinstate the so-called Mexico City policy that bans U.S. foreign aid dollars from being used to do abortions, he said.
But then there’s this, via HuffPost’s Elise Foley:
The Romney campaign walked back the remark within two hours of the Register posting its story. Spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the National Review Online‘s Katrina Trinko that Romney “would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.”
And speaking of National Review Online, that’s who published Romney’s definitive statement on abortion policy during the Republican primary battle, when Romney was justifying his refusal to sign a very radical pledge presented by the Susan B. Anthony List:
I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.
I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench.
I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. And as president, I will support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood, which primarily performs abortions or offers abortion-related services.
I will reinstate the Mexico City Policy to ensure that nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from America refrain from performing or promoting abortion services, as a method of family planning, in other countries. This includes ending American funding for any United Nations or other foreign assistance program that promotes or performs abortions on women around the world.
I will advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.
And perhaps most importantly, I will only appoint judges who adhere to the Constitution and the laws as they are written, not as they want them to be written.
So last year, in a carefully considered and drafted statement, Romney was all for new legislation to ban federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and promised to “advocate and support” federal “fetal pain” legislation along the lines of bills being promoted by anti-choice legislators from sea to shining sea. He basically agreed to do anything within the president’s power to help The Cause, with the exception of administering litmus tests to a host of his appointees, which is what the SBA List was asking him to do. To some extent, his comments to the Register simply reflected the limitations of the executive branch on this particular subject, which has been a source of great frustration to anti-choicers over the years.
But Moderate Mitt should not be able to get away with bland reassurances on this issue–with his own campaign repudiating him almost on the spot–without dealing with specific pledges he made during this very campaign. Is he–on behalf of himself and his loyal running-mate, Paul Ryan, who up until now has been universally considered a leader in the anti-choice cause–specifically retracting promises to promote a funding ban on Planned Parenthood and federal legislation flatly banning abortions prior to some arbitrary point in the second trimester of pregnancy?
It would be good to know if Moderate Mitt is talking out of both sides of his mouth.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 10, 2012
“Follow-Up Questions”: Unlike The Fawning Coverage He’s Received In The Past, Paul Ryan Shows His Thin Skin
Paul Ryan, we are discovering, does not always handle follow-up questions that well.
The latest evidence came yesterday afternoon, when an interview with a local television reporter in Michigan turned testy and was ended by Ryan’s aide.
The dispute was ostensibly over gun control. Asked by reporter Terry Camp of WJRT in Flint if America has a gun problem, Ryan responded that the country has a crime problem. “Not a gun problem?” Camp asked. “No,” Ryan replied, arguing that existing laws should be enforced and that “the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities” – for “charities, and civic groups and churches” to teach people “good discipline, good character.”
“And you can do all that by cutting taxes – with a big tax cut,” Camp replied.
“Those are your words, not mine,” Ryan said, at which point his aide stepped in to end the interview.
“That was kind of strange – trying to stuff words in people’s mouths,” Ryan told Camp as he took his microphone off.
As Erik Wemple points out, it’s unclear what Camp’s intent here was. Ryan interpreted his words about tax cuts as a rude expression of skepticism and editorializing, but Camp and the station insist he wasn’t trying to make any kind of political statement and was merely asking another question. It’s certainly possible that Camp was just trying to prompt Ryan to expand his thoughts, and that he used some clumsy short-hand to do it.
The way Ryan chose to handle this seems noteworthy, though. Several times in the past few months, he’s been pressed by reporters and has had trouble deflecting lines of questioning that make him uncomfortable.
When he first joined the GOP ticket, for instance, Ryan sat for what everyone assumed would be a friendly interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume, who asked him about the long amount of time – not until 2040 – that it would take his fiscal blueprint to produce a balanced budget. Ryan replied that he wasn’t running on his budget plan – he was running on Romney’s. OK, Hume replied, well how long will it take Romney’s plan to bring about a balanced budget.
“I don’t know exactly when it balances,” Ryan conceded, “because we have – I don’t want to get wonky on you, but we have to run the numbers on that specific plan.”
More recently, there was Ryan’s sit-down with Fox’s Chris Wallace, who quizzed him about the Romney tax plan’s lack of specificity. Romney proposes a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut and insists he’ll make it deficit neutral by closing loopholes and deductions, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Wallace challenged Ryan to explain how the math would work.
“Well, I don’t have the time,” Ryan replied. “It would take me too long to go through all the math.”
That answer won Ryan no shortage of ridicule. It points to the steep learning curve he’s faced since being tapped as Romney’s No. 2. As a congressman, Ryan has been unusually visible, but the press coverage he’s received has tended to be rather fawning – reporters, columnists and television hosts giving him a chance to outline his plan and the hailing him as the rare adult in DC who’s willing to produce serious ideas.
It’s easy to get accustomed to that kind of treatment. But since August (and particularly since his vice presidential acceptance speech), the media has treated him with more skepticism, demanding that he and Romney fill in the blanks on their plans. Ryan doesn’t always seem used to aggressive scrutiny and follow-up questioning in interviews, and it’s shown on several occasions now. The interview with Camp isn’t a huge deal, but Ryan probably could have handled it in a way that didn’t create a big story. It’s a reminder that he’s still learning. And it makes this week’s VP debate that much more interesting, since Ryan figures to come in for some aggressive questioning from his opponent, Joe Biden.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, October 9, 2012
“Intrinsic Evils And Prudential Judgments”: The Right-Wing Catholic Vice-Presidential Voter Guide
Before there were soccer moms or NASCAR dads, there were Catholics. Once a Democratic bastion, they have been the bellwether voting bloc for the last forty years. As Ross Douthat of The New York Times notes, “Exit polling tells us that in every presidential election since 1972, the candidate who has won Catholics has won the popular vote as well.
Now the religious right is targeting Catholics with a narrow message of what Catholic teachings should mean in the political realm.
The Family Research Council, a socially conservative advocacy organization, has released a “2012 Catholic Vice-Presidential Voter Guide.” This seems especially relevant since both Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) are Catholic and were chosen partly for their putative appeal to Midwestern Catholic voters. FRC defines Catholic issues in a way that is far more congenial to Republicans.
They list nine “Intrinsic Evils,” of which eight favor the Republican position: various manifestations of opposition to abortion, gay rights and stem cell research. The one outlier is torture of foreign prisoners of war, which Vice President Biden, like the Catholic Church, opposes. (FRC could not find a position on torture taken by Ryan.)
Then there are “Prudential Judgments” on which good Catholics may disagree. These include more issues on which Catholic teaching would line up with Democratic values, such as amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Curiously, FRC offers the proportions of Biden’s and Ryan’s income that each gave to charity, but no other mention of helping the poor. It’s as if the few thousand dollars Ryan gave matters more than the trillions he would cut from social programs.
The justifications for how FRC determined what is a Catholic issue and where the candidates stand on them are provided in a “supporting document.”
Given the Catholic Church’s long commitment to aiding the needy, the absence of economic policy seems a bit odd. Ryan, after all, has been criticized by Catholic bishops because his budget would cut funding to essential anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid and food stamps to pay for tax cuts for the rich. In fact, the voter guide would give a Catholic the false impression that Ryan actually supports more aid to the poor than Biden, because he has given more to charity. (Although, as the supporting document unintentionally demonstrates, many of those charities—such as the Boy Scouts and crisis pregnancy centers—have little if anything to do with addressing poverty.)
FRC’s response would be that the Catholic Church only holds a vague notion that poverty should be ameliorated, not specific positions on how to do so. “Ryan makes the argument it’s not that you don’t help people in need rise out of poverty, it’s how you do that,” says Tom McCluskey, senior vice president of FRC Action. “It’s a political difference that has no relevance to Catholic teaching.”
I’m no expert in Catholic teaching, but I beg to differ. The church has repeatedly supported federal anti-poverty programs, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, that Biden supports and Ryan opposes. Even taking at face value Ryan’s claim that cutting taxes on the wealthy will grow the economy and thus lift more poor people into jobs, or better-paying ones, there will always be unemployed people, especially the disabled. The fact that Ryan would decimate their essential social services is fundamentally at odds with any concern for the vulnerable.
But McCluskey clearly believes in this distinction. He says:
Catholic doctrine is an official edict of the Catholic Church. On the issue of life, for example, there is only black and white, there is no gray [as is there is on economic justice]. A pro-life universal health care bill was supported by US Conference of Catholic bishops, but opposed by many individual bishops and that did not hurt their standing in the Church.
If a Catholic bishop were to take an opposing view on the life of the unborn, that would be unheard of and going against Catholic teaching. Support for increasing Medicaid funding would be more like Catholic opinion [than Catholic doctrine].
McCluskey also says the voter guide’s scope was limited by available information. “We couldn’t compare apples and oranges. If Ryan had a position we need one from Biden.” The one exception they made, given how essential it is Catholic teaching, is for torture. That notwithstanding, the general impression conveyed by the voter guide is that a good Catholic would prefer Paul Ryan, since Ryan’s decidedly un-Catholic fondness for warfare and opposition to welfare are not mentioned.
FRC is currently just sending the guide to thought leaders in the Catholic community such as priests and groups at Catholic universities. “We’re not at this point sending to voters but if it’s financially possible it’s definitely something we’re going to look at,” says McCluskey.
It might not even matter if they do spread it far and wide. There is tendency among journalists and political professionals to act as if the Catholic vote’s priorities reflect Catholic theology. The lazy conventional wisdom holds that this is because Catholics follow their church’s teachings and thus hold commitments that are orthogonal to the partisan divide. Here’s Mark Stricherz, of Catholicvote.org:
While experts define the Catholic vote in many ways, I define it as a vote that mirrors the social teaching of the hierarchy, especially the American bishops: culturally conservative, economically populist or liberal, and moderate to liberal on foreign policy.
Stricherz is approvingly cited by Douthat as a premise to Douthat’s argument that Obama has failed to appeal to these voters because he has emphasized his commitment to women’s rights and gay rights. Also in The New York Times, and also cited by Douthat, is Jim Arkedis, a Catholic Democrat who works for the Progressive Policy Institute. Arkedis writes:
The key to winning the Catholic vote is to understand its composition—litmus-test abortion voters, moderates, women and Hispanics—and to aim to carry persuadable Catholics by healthy margins in crucial swing states. The Obama campaign should tread lightly, however, and resist any poll-driven urge to drive a wedge between the faithful and official church positions on women’s issues or same-sex marriage. Divisive messaging probably won’t fly among most Catholics, who may grumble about their religious leaders’ positions, but don’t seek overt separation from them. I can’t say that there’s any scientific evidence to support this theory, but it comes from my observations over a lifetime in the Catholic community.
The Obama campaign’s message should unequivocally stand with the Church and Jesus Christ’s humble message of social justice, equality and inclusion.
Arkedis certainly does lack scientific evidence. And considering there is no shortage of polling data on the opinions of Catholic voters, it is mysterious that the Times would allow him to make such an unsubstantiated argument.
Catholics are actually no more socially conservative than the electorate as a whole. Gallup polling has found “almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics” on whether abortion and stem cell research are morally acceptable. That’s because Catholic voters do not take their marching orders from the church. A massive study by Georgetown University found Catholics growing more likely to make up their own minds about social issues. “American Catholics…increasingly tune out the hierarchy on issues of sexual morality,” reports the Religion News Service. “The sweeping [Georgetown] survey shows that over the last quarter-century, US Catholics have become increasingly likely to say that individuals, not church leaders, have the final say on abortion, homosexuality and divorce and remarriage.”
At the state level the Catholic electorate seems to actually be a force for social moderation. Take a look at the religious breakdown of states and you will find that predicting whether a state will lean Democratic or Republican is often as easy as simply asking whether it has more Catholics or white evangelicals. The ten states with the highest proportion of white evangelicals reads like a roll call of Red America: Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, West Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas. The most Catholic states are concentrated in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, including such Democratic bastions as New York and Massachusetts. In the Republican primaries, Catholic voters consistently favored the mainstream Mormon Mitt Romney, while evangelicals voted for the staunchly socially conservative Catholics Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.
Stricherz points to the existence of Catholic anti–abortion rights Democrats as proof that a distinctly economically populist, socially conservative Catholic vote exists. “Think of the late Bob Casey Sr., governor of Pennsylvania, as the beau ideal politician for the Catholic vote,” Stricherz writes. “If there was no Catholic vote, these pro-life Democrats would be Republicans.” But a few anecdotes is not evidence. One could easily counter with the example of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is Catholic, socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
The real cleavage among Catholics, as has been the case in recent elections, is how religious they are. Voters who go to church once or more per week, regardless of their denomination, tend to vote Republican, and those who go less often or not at all tend to vote Democratic. McCluskey points to this as evidence that their voter guide is in line with religious Catholics, if not Catholics more generally.
“One thing when talking about polling of Catholics is look at how frequently they go to church,” McCluskey said. “It’s basically an ethnic identity at this point. There are people in my own family who call themselves Catholic but don’t go to church on a weekly basis; that’s a sin. Most polls find those Catholics who go to church on weekly basis tend to run more conservative.”
That’s true, but it also suggests that there are not a large number of undecided voters out there who are socially conservative and fiscally liberal, who can be suckered into voting Republican by being told Catholic issues are limited to abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage and torture. But conservatives will give it a try.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, October 9, 2012
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