“Another Shift In The Works?”: Mitt Romney’s Latest Conversion On Abortion
Is Mitt Romney shifting his abortion position again?
It’s fairly well-known that Romney proclaimed himself in favor of abortion rights when he ran for office in Massachusetts, then reversed himself before launching his presidential bid. But recently, the GOP nominee seems to be softening his opposition somewhat. Or is he?
Romney proclaimed himself a strong supporter of abortion rights both in 1994, when he ran unsuccessfully for Senate against incumbent Democrat Edward Kennedy, and in 2002, when he defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien to become governor.
“I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose,” he said in a 2002 debate with O’Brien. “And I do take exception to Shannon characterizing my view as being any different than hers in this regard; The Boston Globe recently reported there’s not a paper’s width worth of difference between our two positions in this regard.”
But that changed halfway though Romney’s term as governor. He says his conversion came after he talked to a Harvard scientist about embryonic stem cells. Now, he says his position is to oppose almost all abortions.
“My own view is that I oppose abortion except for cases of rape, incest, and where the life of the mother is threatened,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Aug. 24.
But that’s slightly different from what he told CBS that same week.
“My position has been clear throughout the campaign,” he said. “I’m in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and health and life of the mother.”
So in that interview, Romney added one more exception — for the woman’s health.
The Romney campaign won’t say the candidate misspoke, but a spokeswoman does say he doesn’t support an exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman. That’s because other abortion opponents, including GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, insist it creates too large a loophole, since health often encompasses mental health, too.
“The health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it,” said Ryan on the House floor during a debate in 2000 on a bill to ban the procedure some call “partial birth” abortion. “The health exception would render this ban virtually meaningless.”
Beth Shipp, political director for the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, says she’s stunned by those who oppose exceptions for health reasons.
“They actually think that somehow women make up health problems like diabetes, or kidney failure, or breast cancer,” she said, “or any of the myriad of other health concerns that women in this country face when they become pregnant.”
But even without a health exception, the question remains: Does Romney really support abortions for victims of rape? The question has become more relevant in light of the recent controversy surrounding Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin. He suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” couldn’t get pregnant, and later apologized.
But for all of Romney’s efforts to try to distance himself from Akin, when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed a bill that would have required that rape victims be provided not abortions, but morning-after pills in the emergency room.
“It’s very important to remember that emergency contraception is birth control,” says Shipp of NARAL. “It’s not RU-486, which people refer to as the abortion pill.”
Although some very ardent opponents say the morning-after pill can technically cause a very early abortion by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg, medical experts insist that’s not how it works. Yet Romney said it could “terminate life after conception” in a Boston Globe column explaining his veto.
The Republican platform calls for protecting life from conception. It doesn’t allow any exceptions, including those for rape, incest or the life of the woman. Shipp says if that’s Romney’s position, then fine. But voters will see through it if he tries to go back and forth.
“They pay attention. They learn about the issues,” she said. “And every time that Mitt Romney tries to reinvent himself, they say, ‘But wait a minute, I remember you said …’ They do their homework; they understand the responsibility that comes with voting for the highest office in the land.”
Last week, Romney’s oldest sister Jane told reporters at the convention that her brother wasn’t going to ban abortion if he becomes president. “It’s not his focus,” she told a National Journal reporter.
But comments like that, clearly aimed at closing the candidate’s sizable gender gap, could come as a rude surprise to social conservatives Romney’s worked hard to woo for the past seven years.
By: Julie Rovner, NPR, September 3, 2012
“There Goes Lyin’ Ryan”: Marathon Runner, Marathon Liar
The latest controversy involving Rep. Paul “Lyin’” Ryan concerns whether, in a recent interview, willfully misrepresented the time it took him to run a marathon, some 20-odd years ago. He claims it was under three hours, but apparently it was actually over four. While I do believe he’s probably deliberately lying here, rather than innocently “misremembering” (runners tell me they remember their marathon times like other people remember their SAT scores), normally I think it would be way too petty to make a big deal out of it.
However, given that: 1) for some time now, Ryan has had a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth, a reputation that notably enhanced by his convention address, a speech that was unusually mendacious even by the standards of the contemporary G.O.P.; and 2) during the 2000 election, the Republicans, and (especially) their enablers in the mainstream media, hung Al Gore for far less (see here, for example), I think going after Paul Ryan for this is totally fair game.
Yes, it’s trivial BS. And no, I don’t by any means believe that this should be the focal point of attacks on Paul Ryan — the fact that he and his party are such ruthless champions of the immiseration of working people should be the main focus of said attacks, always.
That said, ridicule is a powerful weapon, and one which progressives should not shy away from (though sadly, some of the more misguidedly high-minded ones among us do). Besides, if you think I’m going to pass up the opportunity to crack snarky Rosie Ruiz jokes at Ryan’s expense, you are so, so wrong. Clearly!
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 1, 2012
“His Party Is The Problem”: Romney’s Loyal Opposition Insurgent Cast Members
Who knew that Mitt Romney was such a fan of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign?
“How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?” Romney told thousands of Republican delegates, alternates and hangers-on Thursday night. “Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal.”
Speaking of the “fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president” Americans felt upon Obama’s election, the man who will now seek to prevent the Democratic president’s re-election told the fortieth Republican National Convention about how much he had hoped Obama would succeed “because I wanted America to succeed.”
But it wasn’t just that citizens wanted America to succeed. As Romney noted: “Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who’s living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity.… This was the hope and change America voted for.”
In this, Romney was right.
When Americans went to the polls in 2008, the clear majority voted for Barack Obama because they wanted a president who would address the economic missteps and misdeeds that had caused a stock market meltdown on the eve of the election—handing the new president what even one of his harshest critics, Republican vice president nominee Paul Ryan, admitted in his Wednesday night acceptance speech was “a crisis.”
The response to that crisis, Americans hoped, would do more than just bring a measure of stability to the markets. They hoped that it would bring a measure of prosperity to them and to their communities.
Unfortunately, Obama and his party did not have partners in addressing the crisis.
While Romney says he wanted Obama to succeed, Rush Limbaugh said before the new president was inaugurated in January, 2009, “I hope Obama fails.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on behalf of the president’s legislative partners: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Paul Ryan saw to it: rallying opposition to a stimulus that was designed to jumpstart the economy, opposing healthcare reforms that mirrored those Romney implemented as the governor of Massachusetts, and refusing even the most minimal compromises as the nation’s credit rating was threatened during a absurd fight over whether to raise borrowing limits that Democratic and Republican presidents had raised in the past.
Even in the rare instances where Obama put the needs of the nation—and the moment—above politics, other members of “the loyal opposition” merely opposed. One of them even argued against providing the support that was needed to preserve the American auto industry, writing an article that declared: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
Who was that guy?
Oh, right, Mitt Romney.
Much was made of the web of deception that Paul Ryan wove with his acceptance speech on Wednesday night. But Romney actually tried to one-up his running mate.
The man who stood before the convention of his party and declared that he wanted Barack Obama to succeed campaigned against Obama’s election in 2008—attacking the Democratic nominee and his supporters for proposing “timid, liberal empty gestures.”
Throughout Obama’s first term, Romney was a steady critic—not just of auto bailouts but of virtually all of the policies of the new administration. He never demanded, as Wendell Willkie did after the 1940 elections, that Republicans recognize the necessity of working with a Democratic president. Like Ryan, Romney abandoned the traditional “one nation” Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower and a former Michigan governor named George Romney, which argued that Republicans could and should work with Democrats, especially in tough times.
On a night that was all about telling Mitt Romney’s story, with reflections on his humane service with his church, on his not so humane service with Bain Capital and of his moderate Republican service as governor of Massachusetts (well, except for the Romneycare part), Romney and his enthusiasts had plenty to say about Obama’s failings. Even in speeches that were ostensibly about Romney’s business acumen, there were sharp, at times unrelenting “they just don’t get it” attacks on the president.
Then, Romney went for the jugular with lines like: “President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”
Applause.
“To the majority of Americans who now believe that the future will not be better than the past,” he told the crowd, ‘I can guarantee you this: if Barack Obama is re-elected, you will be right.’”
Thunderous applause.
That just does not sound like a guy who wanted Barack Obama to succeed.
It sounds more like a guy who formed part of a partisan opposition that did everything in its power to make Obama “a one-term president.”
Three years into the first Obama term, veteran Washington watchers Thomas Mann (who works for a think tank packed with former Republican White House aides) and Norman Ornstein (who works for Dick Cheney’s old think tank) wrote an article titled “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party,” observed Mann and Ornstein.
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they continued. “When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
The Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, of Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney, of Gerald Ford and, yes, of Ronald Reagan, never moved so far from the mainstream that it would not cooperate and compromise when it came time to do right by America.
But the party that Mitt Romney now leads moved so far that it was, indeed, “nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
They did not achieve Limbaugh’s dream of forcing an Obama failure. But they made the president’s tenure dramatically harder, and the prospect for renewal dramatically more difficult to achieve. And, now, Mitt Romney says: “Today the time has come for us to put the disappointments of the last four years behind us. To put aside the divisiveness and the recriminations. To forget about what might have been and to look ahead to what can be.”
Or, it could be a time to consider the successes that might have been if the party that has nominated Mitt Romney for president and Paul Ryan for vice president was not “an insurgent outlier in American politics [that was] ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”
“You might have asked yourself over these last years whether this is the America we want,” Romney said in his acceptance speech.
Yes, Americans might have asked just that.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, August 30, 2012
“Look Into My Lies”: Paul Ryan Uses Fact Checkers As Campaign Surrogates
The old saying goes “There are no referees in politics.” But there are fact checkers — Politifact, FactCheck.org, The Fact Checker. These “independent” seers like to think they’re defending the truth. But Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have figured out how to use them to spread lies.
Many of these fact checkers peer into the words of both major parties and do their best to suggest that both sides are the same – despite the fact, for instance, that the GOP’s nominee Mitt Romney has more “Pants on Fire” rulings than any national politician.
Rarely are fact checkers as unanimous and righteous in their condemnation of a falsehood as they have been of the Romney campaign’s claim that the president took the work requirement out of Welfare. It’s a flat out lie. But it’s also the first ad that has moved the dial for Romney. You may have listened as a Romney pollster, when confronted with that fact that the attack is false, said, “We aren’t going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
Instead of letting fact checkers edit their campaign, Romney’s team has a better use for fact checkers: campaign surrogates.
The “birther” scandal shows that debunking lies does little to quell the lie and much more to spread it. It’s a tactic Mitt Romney has used effectively for a year now as he’s accused the president of “apologizing for America.” That never happened. But to debunk the lie, you have to repeat it. It’s classic “He’ll look like hell denying it” politics.
Although modern politicians are generally too smart to repeat lies about themselves, the Romney camp knows the fact checkers will. So how do you dictate what the media will be talking about tomorrow? Make purposely deceptive statements about the issues you want to highlight.
What are Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney’s biggest weaknesses? Medicare; the auto bailout; a hugely unpopular Congress and Ryan’s record of voting for Bush-era surplus-blowing policies.
So Ryan systematically made an “attack by assertion rather than accusation” about each of these issues. By making these attacks in deceptive ways that either ignored or left out crucial facts, he forced the media to repeat his assertions.
From the morning Romney announced Ryan as his running mate, the candidates have been making the assertion that the president funneled – or sometimes “robbed” — $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. This assertion is a classic half-truth in several ways. The money comes from savings that extend the life of the program. Ryan voted to keep the cuts but not to fund ObamaCare.
But you see? We’ve fallen into the precise trap that Ryan set.
While you and I and the fact checkers debunk his half-truth, we’re ignoring the larger issue. Ryan makes huge cuts to current seniors by gutting Medicaid now and then turning Medicare into a voucher program that passes the costs on to seniors. Point: Romney/Ryan.
The best part of this super-sneaky strategy is that it’s fool-proof. Republicans can admit what they’re doing, yet fact checkers and incredulous Democrats still fall into the trap. “Not only was everything Congressman Ryan said factually accurate, but by the Chicago folks highlighting this, they’re advancing our argument,” Sean Spicer, the chief spokesperson for the RNC, said today.
And I have to admit they’re right. Look at the one GM factory in Jannesville that Ryan brought up, deceptively blaming the president for its closure today even though it was scheduled to close during the Bush Administration. We’re doing it again!
Instead of talking about the dozens of GM factories the president helped save or the hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs that the auto rescue protected, we’re talking about one that’s closed. Point: Romney/Ryan.
Instead of talking about how Paul Ryan’s budget increases the deficit, we’re talking about how he voted against Simpson-Bowles. Instead of talking about Paul Ryan’s role in this incredibly unpopular Congress that held the debt limit hostage for a debt deal they won’t even honor, we’re talking about the U.S. credit rating.
These lies are clearly strategically placed, which becomes obvious when you think about what Ryan was really arguing. He wants fewer cuts to government? He wants the government to decide which factories stay open? He wants to protect the poor but cut tens of millions of them from Medicaid?
These aren’t his beliefs, they’re his smokescreen. As long as we’re parsing his words, we’re not talking about how harmful his vision for America actually would be. And that’s obviously what Paul Ryan and the GOP want. The entire convention theme “We Built It!” is based on a deceptive misquote from the president.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine the president lying the way Ryan or Romney do. But if he doesn’t find some way to break through to the truth, the real referees in politics — the voters — may end up being swept up in the tide of lies.
BY: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, August 31, 2012
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