“The L-Word Fits”: Whenever Truth, Integrity, And Honesty Are No More Than Collateral Damage
Officials with the Obama campaign have been a little less reluctant in recent weeks to accuse Mitt Romney and his campaign of “lying.” In each instance, folks like David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and even Stephanie Cutter just last night talking to Rachel, were referring to obvious falsehoods that the Republican campaign surely knew to be untrue.
Today, however, Daniel Henninger has a provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal today, raising concerns about the “sleazy political pedigree” of “the L-word.”
The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.
The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics…. This Obama campaign is saying, We don’t want to compete with Mitt Romney. We want to obliterate him.
Henninger goes on to blame Paul Krugman’s influence on the discourse, at least in part, for the unsettling turn of events.
It’s worth noting that Henninger’s piece is a little over the top. OK, more than a little. I’ll gladly concede that “the L-word” is harsh, and isn’t too common at the presidential level, but those who haven’t heard it used in national politics since “fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s” need to get out more.
For that matter, Team Obama has begun using the word more, not to “obliterate” Romney or “eliminate” him from political participation, but for more mundane reasons — they see Romney lying, repeatedly, and have decided to call him on it.
Media professionals watching the campaign have a choice: they can either (a) be outraged by a candidate basing much of his campaign on ugly, demonstrable falsehoods; or (b) be offended by a rival campaign calling lies “lies.” Henninger prefers the latter; I think that’s backwards.
Indeed, what I’d encourage observers to consider is the larger system of incentives. Imagine you’re a candidate desperate to win, and you’re prepared to do just about anything to advance your ambitions. You’ve decided the truth, integrity, and honesty are little more than collateral damage — the ends justify the means.
You’ve also noticed that lying is easy to get away with, since the political establishment deems “the L-word” too harsh for polite discourse. You can repeat obvious falsehoods, but the media will be expected to stick to “he said, she said” reporting, and your opponents will be asked to stick to contemporary norms, steering clear of accusations that seem shrill.
Under this scenario, what incentives are there? If a candidate doesn’t respect the electorate enough to be honest, and he or she cares more about votes than character, what’s to stop that candidate from lying constantly?
The problem here isn’t the Obama campaign’s use of a word Daniel Henninger finds “unsettling”; the problem here is Mitt’s Mendacity.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2012
“Truth-Telling As Fascism”: Is There A Better Way To Describe What Romney’s Been Doing In This Election Cycle?
It’s getting a lot of derisive attention today, but let me add my own hilarity to the general reaction to Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal column today suggesting that people in politics should never, ever, call each other “liars.” Here’s the passage being quoted most:
The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.
The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics.
Um, no. The habit of 1930s totalitarians was to either (a) ignore everything enemies say and simply exclude them because of who they are, or (b) force them to confess their perfidies, the more lurid the better. The only people I know of in U.S. politics with those unsavory characteristics are typically Republicans who have been calling their opponents “un-American” for years, and/or suggesting that anyone who doesn’t accept “constitutional conservative” policy prescriptions hates the country and God Almighty. Nobody’s trying to “eliminate” Mitt Romney “from participation in politics.” The people, myself included, who have called him a “liar” have done so because he’s, you know, on a factual basis, “lied.” It’s hard to call the massive ad campaign run by Romney accusing the Obama administration of abolishing work requirements for welfare anything other than a “lie.” Since it’s not very likely that Mitt Romney fails to grasp elementary arithmetic, his repeated assertions that there are no contradictions built into his tax proposals have risen to the level of a “lie,” as well. And as readers of Brother Steve Benen know, you can go on and on and on and on.
Sometimes people on the left accuse Romney of lying when it would be possible to accuse him of “misrepresentations” or “fudging the truth” or “serial exaggeration” and so forth. But you know what? Romney’s habit of using lies to reinforce even bigger lies (e.g., his preposterous claim that his “health care plan” would take care of the uninsured just as much as Obamacare would, or his alleged interest in governing in a bipartisan manner, or his supposed independence from the Cultural Right) kind of makes me lose interest in cutting the guy any slack in theoretically close cases. And in complaining (as his running mate did earlier this week) about Democratic attacks on his integrity, Romney hardly comes into the political court of equity with clean hands, having run hatefully negative ads on both his primary and general election opponents whenever it seemed helpful to his candidacy.
But the clincher to me is that it’s not just “liberals” who think there’s something specially mendacious about Romney’s campaign: it’s what conservatives said for months when they were searching high and low for any plausible alternative to the man, and then what they said about his general-election campaign until very, very recently. Why can’t Mitt be loud and proud about his conservative agenda? they asked over and over about the policy positions he continues to hide and distort with every breath.
If Henninger or anyone else can come up with a better way of describing what Romney’s been doing in this election cycle again and again, I’m all ears. For a while I thought about calling him “Nixonian” in his byzantine twists and turns. But after a while, this became an insult to the memory of the Tricky One. In any event, don’t call those of us who have the responsibility of truth-telling about Romney and his vast, dishonest Potemkin Village of a campaign “fascist.” Nobody’s trying to silence Mitt Romney; we’d just prefer he’d unfork his tongue a lot more often. It’s exhausting just keeping up with the man’s mendacity, or whatever you choose to call his aversion to anything like straight talk.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 11, 2012
“The Company Vote”: Republican Bully Bosses Threaten Democracy
The Company Store, a pre-union institution wherein underpaid workers were all but required to buy items from a shop owned by their employer, is thankfully gone. The 21st century version is far more insidious: the Company Vote.
There were the coal miners in Ohio who were required to attend a rally for Mitt Romney—without pay, even though they had been taken off the job to do it. Footage of the rally was used in a Romney TV ad. Bizarrely, Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore explained that the miners were required to come, except that they weren’t. He told a local radio station:
We had managers that communicated [to employees] that the attendance was mandatory. But no one was forced to attend the event.
The New Republic later reported an even worse transgression—that Moore, a Romney donor, had pressured the company’s workers to donate to the Republican nominee.
And if pressure doesn’t work, try threats. That’s what David Siegel, the billionaire owner of a massive time-share company, did in a memo to employees, in which he stated:
If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. You see, I can longer support a system that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, so will your opportunities.
If Siegel’s name sound familiar, it’s because he’s in the movies—showcasing his greed, not displaying his talent. Siegel and his wife—who perfects the Real Housewives technique of looking like she spends a great deal of money to look cheap—are the subjects of the acclaimed The Queen of Versailles, a documentary film about the couple’s efforts to build the largest privately-owned home in the country. That displays a level of self-centeredness and insecurity that is almost clinical in scale. But Siegel’s effort to intimidate workers is appalling.
Remarkably, Siegel told Reuters that his firm was doing quite well during the recession—he told the news agency his company, Westgate, was the most profitable it had been in its 30-year history, was hiring 1,500 new employees this year, and that banks were “throwing money at us.”
And yet, Siegel was more foreboding in his memo to workers, saying:
The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration.
There’s a serious threat here, but it’s not to Siegel’s obscene wealth and even more profane greed. The threat is to representative democracy. Siegel’s a successful businessman, and he’s entitled to do (mostly) what he wants with his money—perhaps even building monuments to himself. He is not entitled to extort votes.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 11, 2012
“Insincere And Playing Dumb”: Mitt Romney’s Shameless Appeal To Women
Two things happened yesterday that don’t seem unrelated. First, there was the release of a new poll in Ohio that showed Mitt Romney pulling closer to President Obama but still trailing by 4 points – thanks to a massive 36-point gender gap. Then came Romney’s statement to an editorial board that “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”
This is an extension of the strategy Romney employed at last week’s debate, simply playing dumb when confronted with the aspects of conservative ideology that are difficult to market outside the Republican Party base. In this case, there is a clear urgency for Romney in creating distance between himself and the right’s recent fixation on reproductive issues: A recent Bloomberg poll of swing voters in Ohio and Virginia found Romney leading among married mothers by a few points in each state – with the potential to open much bigger leads if he can work around the concerns they have about his views on women’s issues.
Romney, the Bloomberg poll showed, enjoys a clear advantage among these women on the economy, but has been hindered by, among other things, his vow to defund Planned Parenthood, his opposition to Obama’s decision to mandate insurance coverage of birth control, and his antiabortion position. The new Ohio numbers, from a CNN poll released yesterday, speak to Romney’s challenge. Among men in the Buckeye State, he’s now clobbering Obama, 56 to 42 percent. But with women, Obama is winning by a 60-38 percent margin. That translates into a 51-47 percent overall lead for the president, but if Romney can erode Obama’s advantage with women even a little, he can make up that ground.
Romney has played this game before, in the only general election before now that he ever won. It was exactly 10 years ago that he was running for governor of Massachusetts and found himself trailing in the race’s final weeks. The Romney campaign’s main strategy was to scare suburban swing voters with the specter of rampant Democratic cronyism in the state capitol – warning voters that a “gang of three” Democrats would run the state if Romney’s Democratic opponent, Shannon O’Brien, were elected.
But part of appealing to these swing voters also involved assuaging any concerns they had about Romney being to their right on cultural issues, particularly abortion. On this front, O’Brien spotted a clear opening. The year before, when he’d been back in Utah overseeing the Olympics, Romney had been thinking that his political future would be in the Beehive State, and not Massachusetts, where a Republican, Jane Swift, was serving as acting governor and where both Democratic senators were entrenched. So Romney, who had run as a passionate abortion rights supporter in his 1994 campaign against Ted Kennedy, began repositioning himself to fit in with Utah’s far-right Republican electorate, penning a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune in July 2001 in which he instructed the paper not to identify him as pro-choice.
It wasn’t a complete policy shift. Romney left himself enough wiggle room in case a 2002 opportunity back in Massachusetts opened up – which it did a few months later, as Swift’s governorship collapsed and Republicans begged Romney to come home and save them. So it was that Romney in ’02 resumed presenting himself as an abortion rights advocate, although this time in more muted terms, promising that he would uphold the state’s laws and do nothing to restrict abortion access, but shying away from the pro-choice label. Presumably, this was meant to seem consistent with the ’01 letter he wrote in Utah; it was probably also done with the knowledge that, if he ever wanted to go national as a Republican candidate, Romney would have to eventually declare himself pro-life.
O’Brien recognized all of this and tried to corner Romney in their final debate, just over a week before the election. It can be maddening to watch their encounter now. O’Brien’s warnings about Romney’s obvious insincerity on the issue seem prescient today, but at the time, Romney did a rather masterful job deflecting them, pretending he had no idea why anyone would be confused about his position and aligning himself perfectly with the sentiments of swing voters. He even turned the tables on O’Brien, who in an effort to show a clear policy difference with Romney on the issue came out against a parental consent law. In other words, on the one abortion policy area where they officially disagreed, Romney managed to express the more broadly popular view.
The Romney who bested O’Brien in that debate was the same Romney who showed up in Denver last week. And it’s the same Romney who expressed bafflement to the Des Moines Register’s editorial board yesterday over why anyone would think he’d make restricting abortion a priority as president.
There is a difference this time, though. As Irin Carmon points out, restricting abortion absolutely is a priority for the national Republican Party, and if Romney is president he won’t have much leeway to defy this sentiment. You can see it already, in fact, with the Romney campaign’s quick clarifying statement last night that he “would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” Consider it a preview of a Romney presidency. If he strays on an issue important to the right, it won’t be long until the right brings him back into line.
The question for now is whether Romney can downplay reproductive issues enough to eat into the gender gap. At the national level, that gap seems to be evaporating quickly in the wake of last week’s debate. But the Ohio numbers suggest that things might be different in the swing states, where the candidates have concentrated their resources and where voters are presumably more familiar with their messages.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, October 10, 2012
“Romney Is One Unique Acrobat”: The Rarely Seen, Hard-To-Execute Flip-Flop-Flip
Back in June, Mitt Romney offered an important insight into how he views economic policy.
“[President Obama] wants to hire more government workers,” Romney said. “He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Right. It’ll “help the American people” just as soon as we allow more layoffs of school teachers and first responders. Why will the economy benefit when these workers are unemployed? Romney never got around to explaining that, but the larger point was hard to miss: the president believes the country would benefit from fewer teacher layoffs; Romney believes the opposite.
At least, that’s the way it seemed. Four months later, in last week’s debate, President Obama brought this up, noting, “Governor Romney doesn’t think we need more teachers. I do.”
The Republican responded, “I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers.” In other words, Romney no longer seems to agree with what he said in June.
That is, until yesterday, when Romney sat down with the editors of the Des Moines Register. As Sam Stein noted, the former governor seemed to revert back to his original stance, arguing, “He wants to hire more school teachers. We all like school teachers. It’s a wonderful thing. Typically, school teachers are hired by states and localities, not by the federal government. But hiring school teachers is not going to raise the growth of the U.S. economy over the next three-to-four years.”
First, as a matter of economic policy, hundreds of thousands of public education jobs have been lost in recent years, and saving those jobs would, in reality, not only help schools, students, families, but also have a meaningful economic impact. Romney resists this, but teaching is a real job involving a real paycheck. Teachers who are employed can then use that paycheck to purchase goods and services, pay bills, make investments, etc. When those teachers are laid off and federal officials let it happen, the workers withdraw from the marketplace and hurt the economy. Why Romney struggles to understand this is unclear.
Second, we rarely see flip-flop-flips, but Romney, if nothing else, is unique.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow, Blog, October 10, 2012
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