“Mr. Romney Reinvents History”: Says His Party Rallied Behind President Obama
Mitt Romney wrapped the most important speech of his life, for Thursday night’s session of his convention, around an extraordinary reinvention of history — that his party rallied behind President Obama when he won in 2008, hoping that he would succeed. “That president was not the choice of our party,” he said. “We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than divides us.”
The truth, rarely heard this week in Tampa, Fla., is that the Republicans charted a course of denial and obstruction from the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated, determined to deny him a second term by denying him any achievement, no matter the cost to the economy or American security — even if it meant holding the nation’s credit rating hostage to a narrow partisan agenda.
Mr. Romney’s big speech, delivered in a treacly tone with a strange misty smile on his face suggesting he was always about to burst into tears, was of a piece with the rest of the convention. Republicans have offered precious little of substance but a lot of bromides (“A free world is a more peaceful world!”) meant to convey profundity and take passive-aggressive digs at President Obama. But no subjects have received less attention, or been treated with less honesty, than foreign affairs and national security — and Mr. Romney’s banal speech was no exception.
It’s easy to understand why the Republicans have steered clear of these areas. While President Obama is vulnerable on some domestic issues, the Republicans have no purchase on foreign and security policy. In a television interview on Wednesday, Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, could not name an area in which Mr. Obama had failed on foreign policy.
For decades, the Republicans were able to present themselves as the tougher party on foreign and military policy. Mr. Obama has robbed them of that by being aggressive on counterterrorism and by flexing military and diplomatic muscle repeatedly and effectively.
Mitt Romney has tried to sound tough, but it’s hard to see how he would act differently from Mr. Obama except in ways that are scary — like attacking Iran, or overspending on defense in ways that would not provide extra safety but would hurt the economy.
Before Thursday night, the big foreign policy speeches were delivered by Senator John McCain and Ms. Rice. Mr. McCain was specific on one thing: Mr. Obama’s plan to start pulling out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014 is too rapid. While he does not speak for Mr. Romney, his other ideas were unnerving, like suggesting that the United States should intervene in Syria.
Mr. Romney reportedly considered Ms. Rice as a running mate, and she seems to have real influence. But Ms. Rice is a reminder of the colossal errors and deceptions of George W. Bush’s administration. She was a central player in the decision to invade Iraq and the peddling of fantasies about weapons of mass destruction. She barely mentioned Iraq in her speech and spoke not at all about Afghanistan. She was particularly ludicrous when she talked about keeping America strong at home so it could be strong globally, since she was part of the team that fought two wars off the books and entirely on borrowed money.
Ms. Rice said the United States has lost its “exceptionalism,” but she never gave the slightest clue what she meant by that — a return to President Bush’s policy of preventive and unnecessary war?
She and Mr. McCain both invoked the idea of “peace through strength,” but one of the few concrete proposals Mr. Romney has made — spending 4 percent of G.D.P. on defense — would weaken the economy severely. Mr. McCain was not telling the truth when he said Mr. Obama wants to cut another $500 billion from military spending. That amount was imposed by the Republicans as part of the extortion they demanded to raise the debt ceiling.
Ms. Rice said American allies need to know where the United States stands and that alliances are vitally important. But the truth is that Mr. Obama has repaired those alliances and restored allies’ confidence in America’s position after Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice spent years tearing them apart and ruining America’s reputation in the world.
The one alliance on which there is real debate between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama is with Israel. But it is not, as Mr. Romney and his supporters want Americans to believe, about whether Mr. Obama is a supporter of Israel. Every modern president has been, including Mr. Obama. Apart from outsourcing his policy to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on settlements, it’s not clear what Mr. Romney would do differently.
But after watching the Republicans for three days in Florida, that comes as no surprise.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, August 30, 2012
“Contempt For The Mainstream”: Republican Platform Deletes All Memory Of Moderation
The campaign platform adopted by the Republican party this week became instantly notorious for its plunge to the right, deleting all memory of moderation in previous years. The document might be even more remarkable, however, for its tone of utter defiance.
No one expected the party to soften its support for gun rights, even after the Aurora shooting. But despite the national horror at the deaths of 12 people and the injuries to 58 others, Republicans deliberately added a plank to this year’s platform intended to inflame the gun debate.
As the Associated Press reports, the platform contains this new line: “We oppose legislation that is intended to restrict our Second Amendment rights by limiting the capacity of clips or magazines.” High-capacity magazines, which allow attackers to shoot more people quickly, without reloading, were used in both in Aurora and in the Tucson shooting that injured the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six. There is no Second Amendment right to shoot without reloading, and even many supporters of the right to bear arms oppose the easy availability of big clips, which used to be illegal.
The platform also supports the “stand your ground” laws that played a role in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida earlier this year. Where the 2008 platform said that citizens have the right to a gun at home for self-defense, the new one adds a line supporting “the fundamental right to self-defense wherever a law-abiding citizen has a legal right to be.”
On another contentious issue, the platform reverses course on disclosure of political donors, sticking a thumb in the eye of previous generations of Republicans who believed that full disclosure was the antidote to unlimited contributions. As Paul Blumenthal of the Huffington Post reported today, earlier platforms going back to 1996 supported full disclosure, but the current version says exactly the opposite.
“We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals,” the document says, explaining why it opposes passage of the Disclose Act, which would end the use of secret donations fueling so many of this year’s attack ads.
After the Citizens United decision, Republicans realized they would gain a huge financial advantage if corporations and executives were allowed to give unlimited sums without fear of public embarrassment. Led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, they constructed a First-Amendment theory to fit this benefit, saying that secrecy protects free speech (for corporations) without worry of harassment.
Now the party has enshrined that political greed and expediency in its fundamental declaration of principles. Although “principles” seems too high-minded a word for these statements of contempt for the mainstream.
By: David Firestone, The New York Times Opinion Pages, August 30, 2012
“A Journey To Nowhere”: Mitt Romney’s Etch A Sketch Speech, Thin On Ideas And Policy
Finally, Mitt Romney shook the Etch a Sketch.
Having given conservatives everything they had asked for — from switching his positions on abortion and immigration to picking their favorite as his running mate — Romney turned Thursday night to his essential task: converting some President Obama’s 2008 supporters into Republican voters.
At a convention where the rhetoric was harsh and often indifferent to facts, Romney took the path of quiet persuasion. For the most part, he chose not to speak to the fervor and anger of political activists on the Right. He addressed instead less-partisan voters he hopes will be open to his candidacy by virtue of their disappointment with the man who had inspired them four years ago.
“Hope and change had a powerful appeal,” Romney said in the speech’s key passage. “But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.”
In a sense, the appeal Romney re-launched here was the argument he had hoped to make from the beginning — that the election was primarily an exercise in judging the incumbent’s stewardship and, in particular, a painfully slow economic recovery.
Romney’s turn had been promised last March by his veteran aide Eric Fehrnstrom, who provided his boss’s foes with a useful metaphor for describing the ease with which the candidate has altered his positions on a long list of issues.
After the primary campaign, Fehrnstrom argued, “everything changes,” and he added: “It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.”
Romney knew that what he most had to shake was a personal image tainted by an impression of inconstancy on issues; attacks on his record in business both by his primary foes and the Obama campaign; and off-the-cuff comments that suggested a great distance between his own experience and the lives of most of the voters whose support he needs.
Speaking a few hours before Romney’s address, Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew research Center, said the surveys pointed to three imperatives for Romney: He had to make himself more likable, more credible and more empathetic.
Thus the unusual amount of detail Romney provided about his family and history. Thus the long narrative about Bain Capital, aimed at changing the impression of a heartless business past that has reduced Romney’s appeal to blue collar voters. Such voters do not celebrate investors and employers with the same ebullience that greeted every mention of the private sector at this convention. The burden of having to tell his personal story fell heavily on this speech: It took up space and time and left the speech very thin on ideas and policy.
Romney hit few ideological hot buttons, and he broke little new ground. His philosophical core is clearly defined by his promise of a pro-business administration that would seek to create jobs by giving investors and CEOs what they want. He continued to paint Obama as lacking understanding of private sector. “Jobs to him are about government,” he said.
Once again, Romney showed that his campaign will launch attacks with little regard for their veracity. “Unlike President Obama,” he said, “I will not raise taxes on the middle class.” While the definition of the “middle class” is flexible, Obama has in fact asked Congress to retain current tax rates for families earning less than $250,000 a year.
“I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour,” Romney also said. “President Obama began with an apology tour.” There was no apology tour. And Romney suggested that Republicans had been initially eager to work with the president, when in fact the party was determined from the beginning to oppose virtually all of Obama’s initiatives.
Romney’s was not a great speech, but it did at least familiarize those who heard it with aspects of his personal journey of which they were unaware. He is likely to get some bounce out of his convention, but it will be short-lived as media attention shifts abruptly to the Democrats’ conclave in Charlotte right after Labor Day.
And there will be a jarring contrast between the Romney who spoke of uniting the nation and his exceptionally harsh, relentless and divisive advertising campaign that includes factually-challenged spots on welfare plainly aimed at stirring resentment.
The stark disjunction will inevitably keep alive the question that his convention speech did not answer: Who is the real Romney?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2012
“Romney’s Carter Delusion”: Mitt’s Acceptance Speech Perfectly Tailored For An Opponent He’s Not Running Against
There’ve been indications lately that Mitt Romney’s campaign no longer believes it will be enough to depend on widespread economic anxiety for a November victory – that too many swing voters like Barack Obama too much and are too willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because of the catastrophe he inherited.
If this is the Romney team’s new thinking, the speech the GOP nominee delivered last night didn’t reflect it. It was perfectly scripted for a candidate who is confident that the basic dynamics of the race favor him and who sees boldness, specificity and unforced errors as his main obstacles on the road to the White House.
I’ve written before about Romney’s desire to function as a generic candidate, someone likable and competent enough to swing voters who are inclined to vote out President Obama and who lacks any sharp edges that might give them pause. His acceptance speech was as broad and formulaic as this strategy. As Jonathan Bernstein put it:
Everything in it was perfunctory: the biographical section (which was weirdly interrupted by a digression into Neil Armstrong and the space race and by a call-out to every elected Republican woman they could scrape up — the whole thing seemed to have a case of attention deficit disorder); the five-point economic program; the foreign policy section; the stirring rhetoric at the end; and, certainly, the delivery.
Probably the most telling passage came when Romney invoked Ronald Reagan’s famous “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” line:
That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: “you are better off today than you were four years ago.” Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.
This president can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office.
Let’s give Romney a pass for not mentioning George H.W. Bush, who flunked the “better off” test in 1992 and was drummed out of office with the lowest share of the popular vote of any president since Taft. This was a Republican convention, after all, and Romney has a warm personal friendship with the 41st president. But in calling attention to Carter’s defeat, Romney seemed to indicate that he shares a common view among Republicans about the 2012 race: that it’s a repeat of 1980.
Optimistic Republican voices have been making the claim a lot lately that, just as they were 32 years ago, swing voters are fed up with the incumbent and itching to fire him, and that’s needed from the opposition party is a modicum of reassurance. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made this case to National Journal just a few hours before Romney’s speech:
“I’m not predicting a blowout like we ended up having in ’80,” McConnell said in an interview. But the mood strikes him as similar. It’s an atmosphere “in which people really don’t think the guy’s done a very good job, and the Democrats are betting on our candidate being inadequate.”
The speech Romney delivered is the speech that a candidate who believes he’s running against another Carter would deliver. The problem for Romney and Republicans is that the 2012-as-1980 model doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny.
The first problem is that Obama is much more popular as he seeks a second term than Carter was. At this point in 1980, it was common for polls to show Carter with an approval rating in the low 30s, or even in the 20s. And his party was bitterly divided. His initial victory in 1976 had been something of a fluke – he’d understood the ramifications of the Democrats’ radically expanded primary calendar better than anyone else and snuck to the nomination without the support of many of the party’s traditional leaders and interest groups – and he’d alienated huge chunks of the Democratic coalition by governing from the center-right on many domestic issues. This gave rise to Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge, which likely would have succeeded had it not been for the sudden Iran hostage crisis at the end of 1979. As it was, Carter limped to renomination with a majority of his own party saying they disapproved of his presidency.
This just isn’t the case for Obama, whose average approval ratings sits at 47.7 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. That’s hardly enough to guarantee him a second term, or even to make him the clear favorite, but it gives him a fighting chance and puts Obama more in the category of George W. Bush in 2004 – not Carter in 1980. Moreover, Obama’s own party is squarely united behind him. He’s never had a serious problem with his own base, and his approval rating among Democrats consistently clocks in over 80 percent.
The other problem with the ’80 comparison, as John Sides detailed earlier this month, is that Carter actually trailed Reagan throughout that year, sometimes by significant margins. Yes, Carter managed to tighten the race after his party’s August convention, when the Kennedy challenge was extinguished once and for all and many (but not all) of his supporters reluctantly returned to the Carter fold, but Reagan led in the vast majority of polls conducted in 1980. The reason the race isn’t generally remembered that way is that there was a strong sense at the time among the political class that Reagan was far too extreme to win a national election – that his Goldwater-style conservatism would somehow catch up with him and erode his lead before Election Day. But it never did.
Again, Obama is in demonstrably better shape on this front than Carter was. In the wake of the debt ceiling debacle last year, Romney briefly pulled ahead of Obama in polling, but since last October, the president has consistently led in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
The speech Romney gave last night would probably be more than enough to topple a president as weak as Carter. But he’s not running against Carter.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, August 31, 2012
“We Did Build That”: The GOP Identification Of Self Worship With Virture
I was pretty much focused on the speeches in Tampa last night, and less on the videos and other trappings, and so didn’t write about the overarching theme of “We Did Build That.” It was, as the New York Times’ Bill Keller noted, pretty odd to see a retort to something Barack Obama actually never said become the dominant theme of the convention dedicated to ousting him from power.
But the one honest thing about this theme and its power among conservatives is the righteous indignation it arouses. Wealthy people, and even some not-so-wealthy people often become furious at the suggestion that their “success” is not purely and simply a tribute to their moral superiority and hard work. The flip side of this calculation, of course, is that people who aren’t so successful are not so virtuous and/or are lazy. When Virtuous Republican Businessman was putting in that extra hour of labor, Lazy Democratic Looter was asleep, or having sex, or doing something else unvirtuous. Or so goes the mythology.
This identification of “success” (i.e., wealth) with virtue, ancient as it is, has always laughably defied common human experience. The hardest working people on earth are those who are literally working to keep from starving. Relatively few of them live in the United States to begin with, and those who do are rarely Republicans. And pride over one’s “success,” particularly if it is expressed via conspicuous wealth, has been the target of stern warnings in virtually every major religious tradition.
It has taken many decades of laborious revisionist work for the devout, scripturally literalist adherents of the faith whose God and Savior was quoted as saying, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God,” to become uninhibited enthusiasts for earthly success and wealth, and despisers of the “undeserving” poor. It’s the same revisionism, of course, that makes it possible for the Roman Catholic Vice Presidential Nominee of the Republican Party to fondly view Ayn Rand as an “intellectual influence,” instead of someone whose books any Christian should abjure like a Black Mass—someone whose fondest desire was to wipe both religion and altruism from the face of the earth.
But such thoughts do not seem to trouble the delegates in Tampa, for whom Paul Ryan is their true leader for decades to come, their very own Ronald Reagan.
I’ve spent a lot of my life around the non-college educated white voters who seem to be the only “swing voters” the GOP is concerned about at the moment, and while a lot of them do indeed tend to “kick down” and resent the “undeserving poor” they view as too lazy to work, they don’t automatically admire the very wealthy—their own bosses, for example—as paragons of virtue. So I suspect this whole “We Did Build That” theme is basically for the emotional benefit of the GOP base and its donors. It says a lot that at a National Convention their hurt feelings must be so lavishly propitiated. And it is about “hurt feelings,” as TNR’s Leon Wieseltier suggests in his savage takedown of Paul Ryan and his intellectual pretensions today:
It is no wonder that Ryan, and of course Romney, set out immediately to distort the president’s “you didn’t build that speech” in Roanoke, because in complicating the causes of economic achievement, and in giving a more correct picture of the conditions of entrepreneurial activity, Obama punctured the radical individualist mythology, the wild self-worship, at the heart of the conservative idea of capitalism.
“Self-worship” is an apt term for people who have all the material abundance anyone could hope for in this life, but still burn with resentment at the “lucky ducky” working poor who don’t have federal income tax liability, and are insulted at the very idea that they owe something back to their community. I hope they enjoyed their evening of self-congratulation last night. To mention another saying by Jesus Christ with respect to self-regarding “godly” folk: “They have received their reward in full.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 29, 2012
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