“Too Many Mitt’s”: Shameless And Shape Shifting; To Know Him Is To Mistrust Him
It will have zero effect on a certain Romney landslide in Utah, but the particular wording and reasoning of the Salt Lake Tribune‘s editorial endorsing Barack Obama will resonate far and wide. The “Trib” chose to write its repudiation of semi-favorite-son Mitt with the tone of someone familiar with a pol who’s sold his birthright for a mess of pottage:
Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.
But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal, and his oversight of the most successful Winter Games on record, that make him the Beehive State’s favorite adopted son. After all, Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.
Sounds like the buildup to an endorsement, eh? Not hardly.
In short, this is the Mitt Romney we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.
Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: “Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?”
The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.
The editorial eventually gets around to some measured positive comments about Barack Obama, but it’s clear from the headline–“Too Many Mitts”–that its main thrust is aimed at showing not everybody in Utah is buying this particular snowstorm.
The president is entertaining audiences today by referring to his opponent with his vast number of serpentine manuevers as someone suffering from “Romnesia.” The Salt Lake Tribune begs to differ: Mitt hasn’t forgotten a thing; he’s just doing whatever the political markets call for, and hoping voters suffer from Romnesia.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2012
“The Wonderland Of Employers”: Binders Full Of Women Aren’t Enough To Solve Pay Inequality
After two debates with almost no mention of women—even the abortion question in the vice presidential debate framed the issue as one of men’s personal beliefs instead of women’s rights—we finally got a solid question about equal pay from an audience member in the town hall presidential debate.
QUESTION: In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?
Mitt Romney knows this is a weak spot for him. He took a beating on his campaign’s unwillingness to offer support for equal pay legislation earlier this year, and his running mate, Paul Ryan, voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Act to secure a woman’s right to sue after she’s suffered pay discrimination. Even though Romney’s been showing off his moderate shtick at the debates, he wasn’t going to go far enough to say that equal pay is a right. Instead, he framed it as a matter of employer largess:
ROMNEY: … Important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.
And I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are—are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we—can’t we find some—some women that are also qualified?”
And—and so we—we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Romney’s phrase “binders full of women” is what immediately grabbed the attention of the online hordes, enough so that a Tumblr collecting mockery of it has already been created. And while it was an amusingly daft turn of phrase (and the Internet never ceases to amaze), the real problem with Romney’s answer is that his only solution to the obstacles women face when seeking fair pay is that employers need to volunteer to pay it.
Romney went on to correctly observe that inflexible work schedules disproportionately affect women, but that’s a different issue from the wage gap, and even then, his only real solution is to leave it up to employers to decide if they care enough to offer flex time. He tried to soften this laissez faire approach to discrimination against women by promising that employers will be so desperate to hire when he’s president they’ll pretty much be forced to take women: “We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.”
Even if Romney really could create the wonderland of employers begging for employees that he imagines here—a claim that earned him four Pinocchios from the Washington Post—there’s no reason to believe that new economy would somehow force employers to start treating female employees fairly. If the free market alone could fix the problem, then women during boom times would have, according to Romney’s logic, achieved equal pay. They did not. That’s because the problem is far more complex than Romney lets on here. A little bit more flex time is nice, but it doesn’t do enough to make up for the yawning gaps in affordable child care, for instance. Plus, Romney completely breezed by the continuing problem of discrimination, which is all the Lilly Ledbetter Act addresses.
He also breezed by his position on contraception, side-stepping his campaign’s support of another type of employee discrimination: employers who want to deny their employees the contraception coverage those employees have paid for. The reality, ugly as it may be to some, is that we need more aggressive government intervention to overcome the various social obstacles that prevent women from achieving true equality with men in the employment market. “Binders full of women” is an evocative image, but Romney’s utter unwillingness to address the true causes of inequality is the real story here.
By: Amanda Marcotte, XX Factor, Slate, October 17, 2012
“Don’t Worry, He’s Lying”: The Basic Gist Of The Case For Mitt Romney
Yesterday, I did an online debate with Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, for New York magazine. We went through a wide range of topics, but one thing we stuck on—for a while—was the issue of Mitt Romney’s political commitments. Bissinger refused to believe that Romney is the conservative he’s campaigned as for the last 18 months, and he insisted Romney would be more moderate than he’s appeared if elected president. Here’s the nut of his argument:
[T]ake a look at Romney’s record as Mass governor. He was not some crazoid conservative. He crossed party lines. He provided the template for Obamacare, for God’s sake.
Romney has at least shown some ability to cross lines, however weak. Obama has not. He is not politically adept. He is not good at crossing the aisle. I can only go on what I have read, but he does not like politics and all the gab and bullshit. Politics is gab and bullshit. So I think Romney has a much better chance of appealing to Dems than Obama will ever have appealing to Rs.
One thing I’ve noticed in defenses of Romney is this idea that we should trust that he’s lying to his conservative supporters, and will be more moderate once in office. This view was recently pushed by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, who wrote an entire column asserting that Romney has no intention of following through on any of his promises.
Since Romney is a chameleon—and happy to switch positions for electoral gain—I can see why some would look at him and assume that he doesn’t plan to carry out his stated plans if elected president. But there are two things worth remembering: First, that presidents almost always attempt to fulfill their campaign promises. Americans like to believe otherwise, but the truth is that the first-term agenda of most presidents mirrors their rhetoric during the campaign. Barack Obama promised middle-class tax cuts and health-care reform, and he delivered. Tax cuts and education reform formed the basis for George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000, and were the first items on his agenda in 2001. Mitt Romney has promised large, across-the-board tax cuts, increased military spending, and cuts to social services. Most likely, that’s what he’ll do.
One last thing: All of this is to say nothing of congressional Republicans, who are committed to following through on the right-wing budgets they passed last year. If Romney wins the White House, one of their own—Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan—will be second-in-command, and it’s absurd to think that they won’t want him to make a push for implementing the Ryan budget. Indeed, as long as they control the Senate, Republicans will be able to pass the Ryan budget without a single Democratic vote. And if they don’t? As Bush demonstrated in his first term, it’s not hard to find a few vulnerable Democrats who will support your priorities for the sake of electoral safety.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, October 18, 2012
“Skewed Equilibrium”: Mitt Romney Is Wrong About The Wage Gap
Asked about the gender wage gap last night, Mitt Romney changed the subject. “What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a — a flexible work schedule that gives women the opportunities that — that they would otherwise not be able to — to afford,” he said. Sensing that he was going to be forced to actually answer the question, Romney added, “I’m going to help women in America get — get good work by getting a stronger economy and by supporting women in the workforce.”
There are so many half-formed assumptions and pseudo-promises here that it’s hard to know where to start, but let’s go to the basic premise: That the wage gap narrows when the economy is strong. That premise, so far as we can see from the data, is wrong.
“In good economic times, bonus payments, overtime hours and merit pay increase,” says Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Women are under-represented in the top echelons,” where compensation has soared in good times. “Women are less likely to work overtime,” she adds, and “research suggests that merit and performance-related pay still is a key area for gender discrimination.” There’s also research suggesting that “salary increases related to promotions might differ by gender.”
In fact, the recent economic woes actually narrowed the wage gap, because while both men and women suffered, men lost more ground, according to a 2011 IWPR analysis: “Real earnings for both men and women have fallen since 2010, by 0.9 percent for women and 2.1 percent for men.” That’s likely because male-dominated sectors like construction were hard hit in the recession. Since then, the majority of job gains in the recovery have gone to men, suggesting that (skewed) equilibrium will likely be restored.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, October 17, 2012
“You’re Welcome Ladies”: What Mitt Romney Will Actually Do On Abortion
During Tuesday’s debate, Mitt Romney did a sneaky little pivot on the issue of contraception coverage that surely went over the head of most of the people watching. What Romney supports is a Republican bill, the Blunt amendment, that would allow any employer to refuse to include coverage for contraception in employees’ health insurance. For many women, that would mean they would be shut out of getting contraception through the plans that, we should note, they paid for themselves (insurance coverage isn’t a favor your employer does for you, it’s part of your compensation that you get in return for your labor, which means you paid for it). But when it came up in the debate, Romney said this:
“I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives. And—and the—and the president’s statement of my policy is completely and totally wrong.”
See what he did there? Instead of answering the actual question of whether your boss should be able to take your coverage for contraception away, he answered a question nobody ever asked, which is whether the government should ban contraception, or whether your boss should be able to literally come to your doctor’s office during your appointment and grab the prescription for birth control pills out of your hand. In other words, Romney thinks your boss should be able to cancel your coverage for contraception, but he generously acknowledges that your boss shouldn’t actually tell you whether you can use contraception or not. You’re welcome, ladies.
Romney is doing something similar on abortion. On the one hand, he has said multiple times that he wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned and wants to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood; on the other he’s been claiming that he really has no abortion agenda at all; nothing to see here, everything will stay as it is (here’s an ad pitched at women, making the case for Mitt the Moderate on both issues). As Michelle Goldberg tells us, social conservatives haven’t said a peep about Romney’s new abortion moderation. Why? Because they know it’s just for show, and they know what really matters.
I’m sure there are more than a few voters who listen to Romney and say, “Well, he doesn’t seem like one of those radical pro-lifers, so I guess I’m OK with him.” But this is a helpful reminder that what’s in the president’s heart is of only minimal importance. The question “Is Mitt Romney really pro-life?” is all but meaningless, not only because it’s Mitt Romney we’re talking about, and when it comes to policy he has no “real” beliefs that exist outside of the pressures and incentives he has at a given moment. More importantly, when we elect a president we effectively elect an entire party, and the party Mitt Romney represents is the GOP circa 2012, a party more conservative than it has ever been before. There are 3,000 appointed positions in the federal government. Who’s going to fill these positions? Why, Republicans, of course. Who’s going to be running the Department of Health and Human Services? People who are committed to undermining the Affordable Care Act, because that’s what Republicans who work on health care policy believe. Who’s going to be running the Department of Labor? Representatives of business who are committed to destroying unions and reducing protections for workers, because that’s what Republicans who work on labor issues believe. Who’s going to be running the EPA? People who are committed to undermining environmental protections and making it easier for industry to pollute, because that’s what Republicans who work on environmental issues believe.
And if Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg decides to retire in two years, would President Romney say, “Just find me the best candidate; I don’t really care if they may vote to uphold Roe v. Wade“? Hell no. He’ll do exactly what everyone on both sides expects, which is to locate the next Samuel Alito, someone who went to the best schools of course and has an admirable elite pedigree, but who also was nurtured within the conservative movement, someone who will make the right wing weep with joy. During his confirmation hearings this prospective justice will say solemnly that he shouldn’t comment on issues that might come before the Court, so he really can’t comment specifically on Roe, but rest assured that he’ll faithfully apply the Constitution and just call those balls and strikes, as John Roberts so memorably put it in his own hearings. Democrats will complain, most will vote against the nominee, but he’ll be confirmed. And within weeks, a dozen lawsuits will be filed with the intention of forcing the Court to revisit Roe. Those cases will fly up the judicial ladder with all deliberate speed, and the four conservatives on the Court and their new colleague will finally get the opportunity they’ve been waiting for. And that will be that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 18, 2012
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