By: E, J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 30, 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
“Take All The Time You Need”: President Obama Should Simply Ask Mitt Romney To “Go Through All The Math”
Paul Ryan revealed every bit as much about the agenda of a Romney-Ryan ticket in his Sunday interview with Fox News as Mitt Romney did in his speech to that now-infamous fundraising event in Boca Raton.
Ryan acknowledged during a very long and very painful interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace that nothing matters to a Republican ticket populated by sons of privilege than lowering taxes for sons of privilege.
WALLACE: [What’s] more important to Romney? Would he scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy? Would he scale back and say, OK, you know, we’re going to have to raise taxes for the middle class? I guess the question is what’s most important to him in his tax reform plan?
RYAN: Keeping tax rates down. By lowering tax rates, people keep more of the next dollar that they earn. That matters. That is incentives. That’s pro-growth policy. That creates 7 million jobs. And what should go first…
WALLACE: So that’s more important than…
RYAN: That’s more important than anything.
Cutting taxes for the rich is “more important than anything.”
More important than creating jobs.
More important than renewing manufacturing.
More important than maintaining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
More important that reducing deficits.
More important than addressing debts.
“More important than anything.”
That’s a striking statement of anti-tax absolutism that goes far beyond any agenda Ronald Reagan or most of the great conservative leaders of the past would have dared to advance. And it defines the Republican ticket every bit as thoroughly as did Mitt Romney’s remarks at the fundraising event in Boca Raton.
Romney said to the wealthy donors who had gathered to provide the money needed to elect a Romney-Ryan ticket:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it—that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.… These are people who pay no income tax.… my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
So Romney does not “worry about those people.”
But that is just part of the equation. It prompts another question:
Who would a Romney-Ryan administration worry about?
Ryan has provided the answer: the recipients of the Bush-Cheney tax cuts, who for a decade now have enjoyed the benefits of a redistribution of the wealth upward so sweeping that it has opened a yawning gap between rich and poor.
That’s a political position that Ryan has every right to take. And there is no reason to doubt that he is sincere—as sincere as Mitt Romney was when he said it was not his job to worry about the 47 percent of the American population that has been on the losing end of that redistribution of the wealth upward.
But it is, as well, a position that President Obama and Vice President Biden have every right—and, arguably, every responsibility—to discuss.
When he was being interviewed by Wallace, Paul Ryan was asked to explain the details of his economic agenda. He replied, “It would take me too long to go through all of the math.”
That caused a bit of an outcry.
Ryan responded by telling Milwaukee radio talk show host Charlie Sykes: “I like Chris; I didn’t want to get into all of the math on this because everyone would start changing the channel.”
Ryan argued that “when you’re offering very specific, bold solutions, confusion can be your enemy’s best weapon.”
On Wednesday night, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will take the stage for the first debate between the major-party presidential nominees.
The debate could go anywhere.
The candidates have a good deal of freedom to provide direction.
Perhaps President Obama should simply open up with a simple restatement of what Romney and Ryan have said about dismissing the most vulnerable half of Americans while pouring their energies into maintaining tax breaks for a very wealthy and very politically connected few. Then, on the assumption that an hour and a half might be enough time to “go through all the math,” the president might invite Mitt Romney to take all the time he needs to explain an economic agenda that certainly sounds like a plan to “take” from the 99 percent and “give” to the 1 percent.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 2, 2012
“Zing” Went The Strings Of His Heart: Mitt Romney Learning The Lessons Of Prior Debates Too Well
The other day, The New York Times reported that in their debate preparations, “Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.” This then became the subject of predictable ridicule (check out #romneyzingers or #mittzingers on Twitter), but it actually does give us a window into the unfortunate state of the Romney campaign.
I’m sure they’re feeling pretty tense up in Boston right now. Barack Obama has a small but stubborn lead in every poll, there’s only a month left, and these debates are the best chance the campaign has at doing something dramatic. So if you were involved in Romney’s debate prep, you probably wouldn’t think that just showing your candidate to be smart and likeable will be enough to change the campaign’s direction. Hence the pressure for zingers.
But it’s tempting to learn the lessons of past debates a little too well, and that may be what is happening to the Romney campaign right now. Yes, debates are to a significant degree about “creating moments,” insofar as “moments” are what reporters are looking for. It’s true that reporters’ interpretation of the debate ends up mattering as much or more than the debate itself, since most voters won’t see it and those who do will largely forget the parts they aren’t being reminded of over and over. But if you come out and announce that you’re preparing zingers, then you’ve given the game away, and changed how any zingers Romney does manage to zing are going to be interpreted.
This is one of those things that depends on a mutual agreement between the campaigns and the press. Almost every great line from past debates was planned, but if the zinger is zingy enough, reporters will decide not to spend too much time exploring its provenance and focus instead on what effect it might have on the race. But once you’ve told reporters that you’re preparing some zingers, the only possible response from the observers once the time comes is, “Oh, here’s one of those zingers they prepared.” It will be presented to readers and viewers of post-debate analysis not as “a clever line showing Mitt Romney’s dextrous mind and raising real questions about President Obama,” but “a line Mitt Romney practiced with his campaign advisors, and then delivered on cue.” The Romney campaign has made it impossible for reporters to suspend their disbelief.
Is it possible that the Romney brain trust has crafted a line so brilliant, so biting, so devastating that Obama’s re-election bid will crumble at its utterance? I guess it’s possible, but it’s hard to imagine that the Romney people genuinely believe they’ve come up with such a thing. But at this point, what else have they got?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2012
“A Strategic Conundrum”: Defining The Presidential Debate Game
In this week’s debate, Mitt Romney has too much to do. President Obama has a great deal to lose. Romney’s is the most difficult position. Obama’s is the most dangerous.
Romney needs to use the Denver encounter to reverse the slide he has found himself in since the party conventions. While Republican partisans claim that many of the public polls survey too many Democrats and are thus casting Romney as further behind than he is, the behavior of the Romney campaign suggests it does not believe this. Many of its recent strategic moves have smacked of damage control and appear to reflect an understanding that if the campaign stays on its current trajectory, Obama will prevail.
The most dramatic evidence was the decision to air a 60-second spot touting Romney’s compassion, clearly an effort to counter the disastrous impact of the leaked video showing the Republican nominee writing off 47 percent of the electorate. The former Massachusetts governor’s private words only reinforced months of advertising by Obama and allied groups portraying Romney as a wealthy, out-of-touch champion of the interests of the very rich. Recent polling in swing states has shown that this attack has stuck.
Most striking of all, a campaign that has been relentless in assailing Obama abandoned this approach for a moment in the compassion ad by having Romney declare that “President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families.” Challengers are always in a weak position when they have to hug their opponent for validation. This is a defensive move, a sign of how worried Romney is about Obama’s lead in the surveys as a friend of the middle class and the needy.
That’s why the debate is a strategic conundrum for Romney. On the one hand, he has to use it to change his image, particularly among women and the blue-collar white voters he needs to counter Obama’s overwhelming margins among African-Americans and Latinos. This sort of repair work takes debate time and energy away from Romney’s primary task, which is to put Obama on his heels about his record.
Romney will have to pull off this two-step at a moment when his campaign has been forced into a course correction. The polls suggest Romney is losing what he once thought were his biggest assets against Obama: Swing-state voters, albeit narrowly, now favor Obama as a future steward of the economy and are in a somewhat better mood about its condition. With Romney not certain he can count on the economy as the issue to power him through the campaign’s final weeks, he is scrambling to find other themes. This very process undermines the focus of his efforts and gives his argument a scattershot feel.
Paradoxically, Obama’s advantages over Romney create the president’s biggest debate challenge. He does not want to take great risks because he doesn’t have to. Above all, he wants to avoid a major blunder that would dominate the post-debate news and replace Romney’s problems and mistakes as the principal elements in the media’s narrative.
Yet concentrating too much on avoiding mistakes could itself prove perilous. An excessively cautious performance could give Romney an opening to take over the debate and make the president look reactive. If Romney showed one thing in the primaries, it is that he can be ferocious when faced with the need to dispatch an opponent. Recall the pummeling Romney gave Newt Gingrich in a Jan. 26 debate before the Florida primary.
And while guarding against any hint of passivity, Obama will have to avoid intimations of arrogance or overconfidence. Al Gore marred an otherwise strong night with his rather dismissive sighs during a 2000 debate with George W. Bush. If a comparable moment from Obama is what Romney will hope for from the debate, Obama’s aspiration is for a showdown in which he calmly, perhaps even amiably, maintains focus on the subjects that have consistently given Romney such trouble. Every mention of the number 47 will be a victory for Obama.
One of the shortcomings of the contemporary media environment is that while debates are supposed to be occasions when candidates thrash out matters of consequence thoughtfully and in detail, the outcomes are often judged by snippets that are more about personal character than issues or problems. Journalists, to invoke the most promiscuously deployed phrases, are forever in search of “defining moments” and “game-changers.”
By this standard, Romney very much needs that game-changer. Obama can live quite happily without one.
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