“Swiss Cheese Candidate”: Mitt Romney’s Campaign Places Most Of His Life Off Limits
It’s hard to escape the impression that Mitt Romney’s campaign is about everything but Mitt Romney.
In an era of personality-driven politics, he is running on a central idea—fixing the economy—without the personal flair and calculated charisma that often define White House contenders.
It’s not the world’s worst strategy for a guy who is never going to match Barack Obama on the charm front or feel comfortable chatting with the ladies of The View. Romney is nonetheless running almost neck and neck with the incumbent after a bruising primary battle.
But to the extent that many Americans remain uneasy with Romney, it may be because he reveals so little of himself.
Indeed, Romney has cordoned off major sections of his life, leaving him little to share beyond policy talking points.
If he has one passion in life, it’s business. But Romney barely talks about his experience at Bain Capital, because he doesn’t want to engage on the thousands of jobs lost when his former firm took over ailing companies and sometimes pushed them into bankruptcy. When he talks about Bain, it’s to play defense, as when the Obama campaign put out last week’s video featuring steelworkers who were cut loose when their Bain-owned factory shut down. (Yes, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker didn’t help the team by saying on Sunday that he is uncomfortable with such attacks on private equity, though he backtracked within hours. But how can Bain not be fair game for the president, given the nature of Romney’s campaign?)
The problem for Romney is that his job was to generate big profits for himself and his partners, not to serve as a job-creating agency, which is not exactly bumper-sticker material. So if Romney can’t talk with enthusiasm about his career as a capitalist—his central credential as a candidate—what can he talk about?
Well, he had a reasonably successful term as Massachusetts governor, the only elective office he’s ever held. But we don’t hear much about that. And the reason is hardly a mystery.
The centerpiece of his four years in Boston was a health-care plan passed with bipartisan support. But since Romneycare was the model for Obamacare, which brought the candidate so much grief during the primaries, he now treats it as radioactive.
As for the rest of his Massachusetts tenure, well, Romney doesn’t seem to be selling that either. He ran as a moderate—a pro-choicer, for example—and governed pretty much in that mold. In today’s Tea Party climate, Romney doesn’t want to remind Republicans that he was anything less than severely conservative. So that’s off the table, too.
What’s left? Romney seems determined not to talk about his faith. And there is a political downside. While The New York Times ran a largely positive and respectful front-page story on his Mormonism, it did include details that some would find off-putting, such as that he encouraged a working mother to quit her job so the church would bless her efforts to adopt a child.
My own feeling is that no one has any business demanding that Romney talk about his religion. But I don’t think he’s avoiding the subject solely because, say, evangelical Christians regard Mormonism with suspicion. He is essentially a private guy who believes that such matters are between him and his church, to the point that he won’t even boast about his missionary work as a young man.
But the expectations in our Oprahfied culture are that candidates are supposed to share, even overshare, on such matters. Asked about his favorite philosopher in one of his earliest debates, George W. Bush answered: “Christ, because he changed my heart.” (Bush also spoke about kicking the drinking habit.) Obama’s embrace of religion is such that he took his book title, The Audacity of Hope, from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. (He also wrote about taking drugs as a young man.)
But Romney’s religion is more closed to outsiders than most, and he doesn’t seem to have many sins to confess, as Mormons don’t drink or smoke. So that part of Mitt also remains behind a curtain.
What remains is a kind of Swiss-cheese cutout of a life. Yes, Romney helped turn the Salt Lake City Olympics into a success, but that’s not enough to win the gold medal.
Romney doesn’t even talk much about his hobbies. Sports fan? I have no idea. Movie buff? Who knows? He once talked about hunting varmints, but that drew ridicule. Romney’s wife, Ann, brings a warm touch to describe the unzipped Mitt, but her husband remains decidedly zipped up.
Maybe Romney is running as the anti-charisma candidate. Maybe his team has decided to turn a weakness into a strength: if he can’t match the lofty orator, perhaps he can PowerPoint his way to the presidency by promising results. But on some level, Romney needs to find a way to move beyond bullet points in painting a picture of who he is.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, May 22, 2012
“The Brittle Grip”: Wall Street And The Financial Sector Aren’t Accustomed To Criticism
Republicans often say that the business community feels threatened by President Obama — that he’s hostile to money, hostile to business, etc. You’ve heard this before. And much of it is campaign chatter. But not all. I don’t think we can understand the dynamics of this campaign without getting that a lot of it is actually true — not the reality necessarily (in my mind not the reality at all) but the perception of it in key parts of the financial sector like Wall Street, venture capital and the dread world of private equity.
The case of Wall Street is in many ways the hardest nut to crack. President Obama took a huge political hit for massive amounts of public money that went to bailing out the major banks. By most measures, along with his predecessor, he more or less saved US and global capitalism. And yet, when you talk to people in finance, this is entirely forgotten. What you most often hear about are two or three statements from the President that are still potently remembered.
Most often it’s a late 2009 quote when he said “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street. They’re still puzzled why it is that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down 10, 20 million dollar bonuses after America went through the worst economic year in decades and you guys caused the problem.”
That’s not something you’d expect folks in finance to like particularly. But it did come after about a year of the President getting grief from Wall Street while simultaneously taking the political hit for bailing the same folks out with tax payer dollars.
I’ve heard similar things talking to folks in the business community in DC. And what strikes me again and again is how much it comes back to a handful of statements and anecdotes, things people remember the President saying over the last three plus years.
Some of this shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. President Obama has pushed more regulation of business than his predecessor. (It’s certainly a change after eight years of George W. Bush; and it’s an eight years over which quite a lot has changed in the country.) He’s supported — though as yet not acted on — his call to roll back the Bush tax cuts. But Bill Clinton did all of this and more. Clinton after all is the guy whose tax hikes the Bush tax cuts in large part repealed. By most objective standards the President is actually more solicitous of the business community than most or all Democratic presidents over the last half century.
So what’s the explanation? Over recent weeks I’ve come to think that something else is in play: namely, the dramatic run up in wealth at the top of the income scale, not just over the last 35 years but particularly over the last 15 years. More or less since the beginning of the Clinton years. In a sense it’s the other side of the 99% vs 1% meme that has been the most successful legacy of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
This is less an argument than a theory in progress. So I’d like your input. But I think the very wealthy and those who work in the most advanced and aggressive parts of finance are more defensive about their wealth than in the past — at least in terms of the political expression of it. There’s really no time in the last century in which you’d expect that a candidate running for a major political office who’d been responsible for shutting down a lot of factories wouldn’t have that come up in a major way in a campaign. Simply no way. Agree or not, it would be entirely par for the course. And yet now it’s treated as a possibly unexpected or unacceptable development.
That’s weird.
At the same time, the most important voices in the media are much, much wealthier than in earlier eras. The very wealthy are their friends and peers. Concentrated wealth simply has a stronger hold over mass communications than in the past — not necessarily in venal or corrupt terms but often simply by owning minds and mentalities. What all that amounts to is that people on Wall Street and the financial sector aren’t accustomed to a lot of criticism.
All of it goes to explaining a basic conundrum — President Obama is, when compared to Democrats over the last half century, objectively quite middle of the road. And yet the reaction from Wall Street and the halls of finance is one you’d think meant he was trying to bring capitalism to its knees. The President’s policies and tenure in office simply don’t explain the reaction. And I don’t think political spin does either. We need to look deeper into the political economy of the nation at large to understand it.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, May 21, 2012
“Romney’s Tax Plan In Disgusting Perspective”: Making The Bush Tax Cuts Look Like A Gift To Poor People
In my post this morning on Cory Booker, I noted that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would save households taking in more than $1 million per year an average of at least $250,000 ever year. Let us just dwell on this number for a minute.
Earlier this month, Obama claimed the $250,000 figure. Politifact got to work on it. It turns out, says Politifact, that Obama was telling the truth, and in fact if anything could be described as using the more conservative of two ways of looking at the matter, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center.
You can read the Politifact description, which is thorough and clear. It comes down to this in plain language. As you know the Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year. Let’s say Romney is elected and the Bush cuts are extended, as Romney says he’ll do (and then some). If you don’t credit Romney with extending the Bush cuts–that is, if you just assume they were going to be extended anyhow–then his plan cuts the tax bill for those making more than $1 million a year by $250,000.
But if you credit President Romney with the extension of the Bush cuts, then Romney’s gift to uber-million households come to $390,000 a year. To see how insane this is, let’s add a little perspective: Let’s look at those same Bush tax cuts.
According to this report from Democratic staff in Congress on the impact of Bush cuts that was issued in 2007, households earnings $1 million or more per year received an average cut of $120,000 per year. Let’s think about this.
The Bush tax cuts “accomplished” the following: lowered the tax burden of the very rich to lowest point in 50 years; added $1.8 billion to the deficit; exploded the publicly held debt as a share of GDP; and didn’t really lead to a single net job (depending on how you measure, which will be the topic of a future post).
In other words, they were a disaster for the economy, and brutally inequitable.
And now, Romney’s plan would give the above $1 million per year households twice as much as Bush did, or three times as much. It’s really and truly sad and unbelievable that something like this is even discussed seriously by serious people. This plan makes Bush’s look like a gift to poor people. Of course Romney would say he’s cutting the lower classes’ taxes too, which he is, but that just proves how much more aggressively the Romney plan would deplete the treasury, which again we’ll dig into in detail at other points.
Voters know Bush wrecked the economy. For Romney this deserves to be and can be much a bigger pain than Bain.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 21, 2012
“Weakness Is His One Consistency”: The Romney You See Is The One You’d Get
For all of Mitt Romney’s talk of what he would do on Day One in the White House — Bomb Iran? Or was it Planned Parenthood? — there’s just as good a chance he would be tacking up two pictures on the wall. One would be of George H.W. Bush and the other of Jimmy Carter. They both became one-term presidents after they were challenged in the primaries. This is a lesson for Romney.
It is also a lesson for everyone who thinks that if Romney becomes president, he would govern from the center. This is a widely held belief, encouraged by the Romney camp itself and the supposed gaffe of Eric Fehrnstrom that the world would see a different Romney in the general election: “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.” This is not a gaffe but a feint. Romney would be able to restart nothing.
In the first place, Romney would likely have a Republican House, and maybe a Senate, too. This means he has to work with a party that has just recently punished Richard Lugar for excessive moderation and is willing, at this very moment, to bring down the country’s credit rating another notch rather than budge on the debt ceiling. To Romney, who made a fortune with the clever prestidigitation of debt, this has to make no sense, but he would go along because (1) he’d have to, and (2) he always does.
Congress, though, would be the least of President Romney’s troubles. The real threat will come from the Republican Party’s very core, which likes him little and trusts him less. The moment he shows the slightest moderate or rational tick, someone such as Rick Santorum will barrel out of the GOP’s piney woods, screaming oaths, and enter the 2016 Iowa caucuses that, you might remember, Santorum won in 2012. He must be itching for such a fight, having already called Romney “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” That, folks, is not a fudge.
As luck would have it, the Supreme Court has enabled any billionaire to effectively fund a presidential campaign. Santorum’s guy was Foster Friess, who anted up $2.1 million for the Red, White and Blue Fund, but there are plenty of others. It took a herculean fundraising effort by Pat Buchanan to challenge the elder Bush in 1992 (and get 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire), but it now takes one guy. The conservative movement is lousy with such people, rich men who play with politics as they once did with electric trains.
It’s hardly conceivable that, as president, Romney will become the Romney some think he is. The forces that shaped him in the primaries and caucuses will not go away. He has been clay in the hands of the political right, and this will not change. After Romney recently disparaged Carter’s political courage, Gerald Rafshoon, once Carter’s communications director, shot back with this via Bloomberg View: “Scour Romney’s record for a single example of real political courage — a single, solitary instance, however small, where Romney placed principle or substance above his own short-term political interests. Let me know if you find one.” Rafshoon’s phone has not been ringing.
The widespread belief that Romney would govern from the center is supposedly supported by the equally widespread belief that he is a liar. I hear this all the time: Never mind what Romney said in the primaries, he is a moderate Republican. These people point to Romney’s record as the moderate governor of liberal Massachusetts — even though he has renounced his moderation, as if it was an unaccountable episode of mental instability. The belief that he would revert is the desperate rationale of nominal Democrats who have had it with Barack Obama and want to be excused for abandoning ship. (In the business community, little distinction is made between Obama and Leon Trotsky, another community organizer . . . so to speak.)
According to what a family friend told the New York Times, Mitt and Ann Romney decided he should run for president because they both “felt it was what God wanted them to do.” Having done just that, Romney has left it to others to define what sort of candidate he would be. Nothing would change if he were president. Weakness is his one consistency.
By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 21, 2012
“Failing The Fundamental Test Of Journalism”: Watching Fox Makes You More Stupid
People who work at Fox News might like to think that they are only despised by real journalists because they are conservative and most journalists are liberal. Anyone who saw read the admiring obituaries of William F. Buckley, Jr in mainstream and liberal outlets would know that is nonsense. Journalists, both liberals and ones with no ideology in particular, are quite capable of respecting conservative pundits and reporters who deserve their respect.
But Fox does not. The reason is not because they hold a set of values that others may not share. And it is only partially because they claim to be “Fair and Balanced” when they are neither.
Rather, it is because they fail the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience? According to a new study by Farleigh Dickinson University, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable of any outlet, and they are know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all.
Respondents to the survey were able to answer correctly an average of 1.8 of 4 questions about international news and 1.6 out of 5 questions about domestic affairs. “Based on these results, people who don’t watch any news at all are expected to answer correctly on average 1.22 of the questions about domestic politics, just by guessing or relying on existing basic knowledge,” said Dan Cassino the poll’s analyst.
“The study concludes that media sources have a significant impact on the number of questions that people were able to answer correctly,” wrote Cassino and his colleagues. “The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly.”
This should come as no surprise if you follow Fox. Consider some recent history. “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy invented a quotation from President Obama completely out of thin air. He falsely claimed that Obama had said he and Michelle were not born with silver spoons in their mouths “unlike some people,” in reference to Mitt Romney’s privileged upbringing. In fact, Obama did not say “unlike some people” and he has been using the silver spoon line for years. Several other news outlets repeated Doocy’s assertion as fact and Doocy initially avoided correcting the record after it was revealed he was wrong. Eventually he admitted that he “seemed to misquote” Obama, instead of stating that he did, in fact, misquote him. And he did not apologize for the error.
When Fox isn’t inventing smears against Obama, it uncritically regurgitates corporate funded lies about him. Consider a segment of Sean Hannity’s show from last week. He showed a TV commercial by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group founded and funded by the Koch brothers, that attacks President Obama’s record on investing in renewable energy. Hannity and Frank Luntz praised its effectiveness, with Luntz saying, “It was fact-based, not assertions. You see the facts come up on the screen. There’s specific numbers.”
The only problem is that the factual assertions are incorrect. The ad says, “80 percent of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries.” But the article it cites as a source clearly states only that the money went to foreign firms. The bulk of American tax dollars spent on the subsidies, according to Politifact, went to American subsidiaries of the firms.
The ad goes on to offer specific examples: “$1.2 billion to a solar company that’s building a plant in Mexico. Half a billion to a car company that moved American jobs to Finland. And $39 million to build traffic lights in China. President Obama wasted $16 billion on risky investments.” I won’t bore you with all the details of how each of these claims is untrue; each has been labeled false or mostly false by Politifact or Factcheck.org and you can go to Media Matters for the full rundown.
Hannity routinely takes Republican misinformation as the Gospel truth. To choose just one particularly embarrassing example, he let Herman Cain’s spokesman Mark Block declare absurdly, that a woman named Karen Kraushaar who accused Cain of sexual harassment was the mother of a Politico reporter named Josh Kraushaar. Hannity did not challenge either the veracity of this claim nor question why this “fact” would cast doubt on Politico’s thoroughly reported revelation that Cain has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment. In fact, Josh Kraushaar had left Politico for National Journal over a year before the story even ran, and he is not related to Karen Kraushaar. It would have been easy for Hannity to check on these facts and correct Block’s assertion, but he did not. Here is what Josh wrote about it the next day:
Anybody with Internet access would, at the very least, been able to figure out that I haven’t worked for Politico since June 2010 — and have been working at National Journal since then. I even Tweeted the fact that I wasn’t related to Karen Kraushaar earlier that evening before Hannity’s show to clear up any potential confusion.
That didn’t stop Block. When I heard what Block had said on Hannity’s show, I immediately e-mailed him informing him of his mistake. I still haven’t heard back.
This laziness, partisan hackery and lack of regard for basic accuracy is what separates Fox News from outlets that merely have opinions. And it is doing their audience a disservice. This Fairleigh Dickinson study is not the first to find that Fox News viewers are the most ill informed of any news consumers. As November 22, 2011 Think Progress had found seven studies showing Fox News’ viewers to be the worst informed of all news consumers. In a post about a report that had just come out in the International Journal of Press/Politics, by communication scholar Lauren Feldman of American University and colleagues which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance,” Chris Mooney cited six previous studies with similar findings.
I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction—studies on global warming, health care, health care a second time, the Ground Zero mosque, the Iraq war, and the 2010 election.
I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren’t [emphasis in original] the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven’t seen it. And I have looked.
In the last year, since Fox News fired Glenn Beck and has sought to line up behind more establishment Republican candidates such as Mitt Romney, the new conventional wisdom has been that Fox is tacking back to the center. As a purely strategic move within the Republican Party, that may be true. But, unfortunately, this has not been correlated with any improvement in the quality or independence of their journalism.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 21, 2012
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