“Completely Out Of Touch”: Why Is It Republicans Never Know How Many Homes They Own
Four years ago, John McCain struggled badly when asked how many homes he owns. This year, Mitt Romney has run into a little trouble on the issue himself.
With this in mind, here’s a tip for candidates: please try to keep track of your total number of homes in case the question comes up, because it’s likely to come up.
For years, then-Gov. Tommy Thompson complained that he wasn’t earning big bucks as a government official. Not any more.
Simply ask the U.S. Senate candidate exactly how many residences he owns. Just like U.S. Sen. John McCain, Thompson has a hard time keeping track. “Three,” the veteran Republican responded last week at a campaign event.
Thompson has three houses? Isn’t there another one? “No,” he answered without hesitation.
OK, everybody knows about the farm in his hometown of Elroy and the house in Madison. There’s also his family’s relatively new 10,889-square-foot home on the outskirts of the Walt Disney World Resort in Kissimmee, Fla. A Thompson family trust bought that edifice — and its “top of the line everything,” an online ad says — for $675,000 last year after the bank-owned property was marked down from its original $1.4 million asking price.
Later, the Republican’s staff clarified that Thompson said he owned three homes, he meant to say four. Thompson apparently forgot about the $1.3 million condo he owns off Lake Wisconsin.
There was another — a DC-area home Thompson used during his time as a lobbyist — but the Republican sold it last year.
Matt Canter, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in as statement, “Only an out of touch millionaire influence peddler like Tommy Thompson could forget that he owns a $1.3 million lakefront condominium. Thompson’s memory lapse is not surprising. The fact is Tommy Thompson long ago lost touch with Wisconsin when he cashed in on his political connections to become a millionaire in Washington peddling influence on behalf of special interest clients.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 8, 2012
Why Mitt Likes To Say “I Like”: Destroying The Things He Supposedly Likes
I’m not sure if I like the way Mitt Romney likes things. As the newly empathic candidate was promising to kill Big Bird at Wednesday’s debate, did you notice how he backed into it?
“I like PBS,” Romney started out. “I love Big Bird. I actually like you [to moderator Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to—I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one.”
“Like” is a decaffeinated form of “love” when Mitt uses it, but it’s also a mild protest, a plea for understanding. He usually lays a slight stress on the word, as if he’s revealing some vaguely surprising truth—“You may see me as an unfeeling, uncaring, bottom-line guy, but let me tell you, I enjoy life. I like things.” This man, who is so buttoned-up he can’t be honest about what he’s running on—like whether or not he’d cut taxes for the rich or cover pre-existing conditions in his health plan—uses like to establish his personal bona fides. I’m like you, he’s saying, I have “likes.”
Of course, it helps that like is such a flexible word, meaning “similar,” “approve” and just acting as a rhetorical placeholder, like, well, whatever. Mitt does like (indeed, he requires) a certain flexibility about what he means when he uses words. And because some of his most awkward moments during the campaign have hung from his “I like” tic, you have to wonder what he’s really saying:
“I like grits,” he said, “Strange things are happening to me.”
“I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan…”
At Wednesday’s debate, we learned a few more of Mitt’s most likable things:
“And by the way, I like coal.”
“I like the way we did it in Massachusetts. I like the fact that in my state, we had Republicans and Democrats come together and work together.”
“Now, I like green energy as well…”
And it’s true, all those things are meant to be slightly surprising, particularly when listed by a man at a podium who’s running for president, and worthy of the faint stress he lays upon the word. He’s often pandering, as any politician will. But I also think Mitt is working hard to redefine the word. The most famous example is, of course:
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” And as PBS, Big Bird, and surely now even Jim Lehrer know, every man destroys the thing he likes.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 7, 2012
“Danger Will Romney, Danger”: Mitt Versus The People And The Unpredictable Moment
There’s no question that Mitt Romney did very well in his first debate with Barack Obama. Indeed, it couldn’t have gone much better, so much so that almost any performance in their meeting next week will seem like a let-down. But the second debate poses real dangers for Romney, and an opportunity for Obama to wipe away the memory of his poor performance in the first. Next week’s will be a “town hall”-style debate, and that format plays right into Romney’s weaknesses. The town hall debate will be challenging for Romney for two reasons, both of which have to do with the fact that it will feature not journalists or a moderator asking questions, but ordinary people.
Before I explain why, let’s take a look at what town hall debates involve and how they have played out in the past. The first of these events took place in 1992, and it was a welcome change from prior debates in which a panel of journalists did their best to come up with “gotcha” questions to trip up the candidates. A group of undecided voters was assembled to ask the candidates questions, and it was quickly apparent that these voters had a different set of priorities. They asked about a wider variety of issues than one typically finds in a debate, and avoided the kind of poll-based, strategy-obsessed questions journalists so often ask (“Why aren’t you having more success connecting with voters?”). The most memorable moment of the debate highlighted a novel characteristic of the town hall debate: that viewers were seeing candidates not only talk about policy, but interact with voters. When George H.W. Bush struggled (perhaps understandably) to answer a question a woman posed about how the national debt had personally affected him, he looked defensive and disconnected; when it came his turn to respond, Bill Clinton walked over to the woman, locked eyes with her, and said, “Tell me how it’s affected you again? You know people who have lost their jobs, lost their homes?” He felt her pain, and it was the interaction between him and her that made an impression, more than the substance of what he said.
Each presidential election since has featured one town hall debate. Instead of standing behind a podium, the candidates perch on stools, then get up and walk around as they answer questions. Unlike in some similar debates during the primaries, the assembled undecided voters are close to them, close enough that camera shots will contain both the candidate and the voter he’s speaking to. That creates a much more personal dynamic than the quasi-town hall debates that took place during the primaries, which featured people sitting far away in the audience of a theater and the candidates on stage. You can’t dodge a voter’s question or interrupt them, and you’ll be judged in no small part on whether you seem to have persuaded that one individual. This dynamic upended Bush in 1992; the question about the national debt was one he obviously hadn’t prepared for, but Clinton understood intuitively how to handle it. And that is what makes the town hall debate a threat to Mitt Romney: it’s unpredictable, both in what will be discussed and how it will be discussed.
As James Fallows explained in The Atlantic before the debates began, Romney assiduously prepares for debates, and as long as the questions that arise are those he has practiced answers for, he performs extremely well. “No one I spoke with,” Fallows wrote, “challenged the view that Romney well prepared is a debater who can do real damage. All his team has to do is anticipate every subject that might possibly come up.” In the first debate that was easy. Beforehand, both sides were informed of the agenda, that the debate would center on the economy, with a detour into health care and the rather vague topic of “governing.” There were no curveballs, nothing unexpected, and everything Romney said was most likely an answer he had rehearsed dozens of times. But in the town hall debate, voters could ask about anything, including any of the important issues that haven’t come up at all during the campaign. There might be a question about climate change, or the War on Drugs, or the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or gun violence, or something no one has considered. Some questions will be abstract, but others may be intensely personal—voters in town hall debates have often posed questions in terms of their own lives—and Romney will have to show that he cares not just about “the middle class” or “the 100 percent,” but about that specific individual he’s looking at. And as we know, it’s when he interacts with voters that Romney is prone to looking awkward and uncomfortable and saying things that come back to haunt him.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that Romney will do just fine. The questions might stay on familiar ground, and Romney’s preparation for this debate could serve him as well as it did in the first one. As Politico reported about the first debate, “The more likable version of Romney was no accident—he worked hours on his smile, his posture and the delivery of his words.” Now Romney is no doubt practicing his empathy in his mock debates, interacting with campaign staffers standing in for the regular people he’ll encounter at the town hall debate.
And what about Obama? I went back and watched the 2008 town hall debate between Obama and John McCain, and the contrast between the two men was vivid. Unlike in last week’s debate, Obama was smooth, assured, and engaged. McCain, on the other hand, seemed perturbed and uncomfortable. There was a stark physical contrast between the two men: Obama glided easily from one questioner to another, and did a terrific job of focusing on the person who asked each question, keeping his attention on them and explaining his positions in a way that was substantive but still plain-spoken. McCain would start with the questioner, but then pace around the stage awkwardly as though he couldn’t decide where to stand or whom to look at.
There are some things we can confidently predict about the town hall debate. Obama will almost certainly arrive more awake and aggressive than he was in the first debate. When Romney gets a question he has anticipated, he will deliver a confident, well-rehearsed response. But it’s the unpredictable moment—the oddly phrased question, the out-of-left-field topic, the voter’s personal story—that will likely define the debate. And that could be Romney’s real test.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 8, 2012
“Truth About Jobs”: The Good News That The Deranged Right Just Can’t Handle
If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right — and we’re not just talking fringe figures — was to cry conspiracy.
Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the “B.L.S. truthers” was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities.
It was nonsense, of course. Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has no political appointees. But then maybe Mr. Welch — under whose leadership G.E. reported remarkably smooth earnings growth, with none of the short-term fluctuations you might have expected (fluctuations that reappeared under his successor) — doesn’t know how hard it would be to cook the jobs data.
Furthermore, the methods the bureau uses are public — and anyone familiar with the data understands that they are “noisy,” that especially good (or bad) months will be reported now and then as a simple consequence of statistical randomness. And that in turn means that you shouldn’t put much weight on any one month’s report.
In that case, however, what is the somewhat longer-term trend? Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is.
Some background: the monthly employment report is based on two surveys. One asks a random sample of employers how many people are on their payroll. The other asks a random sample of households whether their members are working or looking for work. And if you look at the trend over the past year or so, both surveys suggest a labor market that is gradually on the mend, with job creation consistently exceeding growth in the working-age population.
On the employer side, the current numbers say that over the past year the economy added 150,000 jobs a month, and revisions will probably push that number up significantly. That’s well above the 90,000 or so added jobs per month that we need to keep up with population. (This number used to be higher, but underlying work force growth has dropped off sharply now that many baby boomers are reaching retirement age.)
Meanwhile, the household survey produces estimates of both the number of Americans employed and the number unemployed, defined as people who are seeking work but don’t currently have a job. The eye-popping number from Friday’s report was a sudden drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, but as I said, you shouldn’t put too much emphasis on one month’s number. The more important point is that unemployment has been on a sustained downward trend.
But isn’t that just because people have given up looking for work, and hence no longer count as unemployed? Actually, no. It’s true that the employment-population ratio — the percentage of adults with jobs — has been more or less flat for the past year. But remember those aging baby boomers: the fraction of American adults who are in their prime working years is falling fast. Once you take the effects of an aging population into account, the numbers show a substantial improvement in the employment picture since the summer of 2011.
None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.
And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle. The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.
It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 8, 2012
“The Campaign’s Moral Hole”: Budgets And Elections Have Moral Consequences
Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?
The question arises in the wake of last week’s presidential debate. However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.
But there are forces working to make the campaign about something more than a suffocating battle to influence tiny slivers of the electorate. One of my favorite pressure groups, Nuns on the Bus, will be launching a five-day tour on Wednesday through the red, blue and purple parts of Ohio.
Who better than a group of women who have consecrated their lives to the Almighty to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences? Those who serve the impoverished, the sick and the dying know rather a lot about what matters — in life, and in elections.
If some of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops often give the impression that they constitute the Republican Party at prayer, the activist nuns often seem like Democrats at the barricades. And it’s quite true that a struggle is on for the political soul of American Catholicism. Those among the faithful who see the abortion issue as trumping all others are in a quarrel with their brethren who place more emphasis on the church’s long-standing commitment to social justice.
Nuns on the Bus, led by Sister Simone Campbell, are very much players in this dialogue, and Sister Simone addressed the Democratic National Convention last month. Yet she was careful in her speech to emphasize that what she has been saying about government’s obligation to the poor — and about the problems with Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget — reflected what the bishops have been saying, too.
She also noted in an interview last week that she had laid down some conditions before she spoke in Charlotte. “I would talk if I could say that I was pro-life, that I could lift up the people who live in poverty and that the Democrats have a big tent,” she said.
The nuns’ message on poverty got some reinforcement in a statement late last month from Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York and Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn. “There are very dark clouds,” they wrote. “Too much rhetoric in the country portrays poor people in a very negative way.”
They argued that the economy is not only failing to “provide sufficient jobs for poor people to earn a decent living to support themselves,” but is also offering fewer “resources for government to do its part for Americans in need.” The situation, they concluded, is “devastating to struggling families throughout the country.”
It’s no accident that the nuns are waging their Ohio campaign against the Ryan budget during the week of the vice presidential debate. One would like to hope that Thursday’s tussle between Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden will be less a parade of numbers and obfuscating talk of “baselines” and concentrate instead on why voters should actually care about what’s in the federal budget.
Sister Simone points to a study from Bread for the World, a genuinely nonpartisan group that advocates on hunger issues, to suggest one useful line of questioning. To make up for the food-stamp cuts in Ryan’s budget, the group found, “every church in the country would have to come up with approximately $50,000 dedicated to feeding people — every year for the next 10 years.” Can government walk away like this? Can we realistically expect our houses of worship to pick up such a tab?
In all the dissections of Obama’s performance in the first debate, not enough attention has been paid to the real problem with his self-presentation: his failure to convey passion for the purposes of government, the requirements of justice and the point of his presidency. “The president,” says Sister Simone, “has gotten disconnected from the people he cares about.”
Nuns on the Bus will no doubt be criticized from the right for intervening in a political campaign, something that doesn’t bother conservatives when religious figures engage on their side. But the nuns’ most important message is to Obama and Biden: Don’t be afraid of reminding voters that budgets and elections have moral consequences. Doing so just might keep debate-watchers from changing the channel.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 7, 2012
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