“A Tale Of Presidential Surrogates”: Bill Clinton Stumps For Obama, While George W. Bush Heads To Cayman Islands
On Thursday, Bill Clinton will be campaigning for President Barack Obama while George W. Bush will be spreading a message that Mitt Romney would rather voters forget, in a stark example of the differing roles that the two former presidents have played in the 2012 campaign.
Clinton will spend Thursday on the campaign trail in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Throughout the 2012 campaign — but especially since giving a universally praised nominating speech on Obama’s behalf at the 2012 Democratic convention — Clinton has been Obama’s most effective surrogate, forcefully endorsing the president’s agenda and gleefully attacking Romney and the Republican Party. Forced off the campaign trail by Hurricane Sandy with just six days until the election, Obama has become more reliant on Clinton than ever. In the past several days, the Obama campaign has dispatched Clinton to Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota — where the former president blasted Romney for the faulty tax plan at the heart of his economic agenda.
Bush, on the other hand, will spend Thursday in the Cayman Islands, delivering the keynote address at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. As Romney struggles to convince voters that he understands their economic struggles, having the previous Republican president reminding them of the questions surrounding Romney’s financial dealings in the Caymans is beyond unhelpful.
Of course, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise; after all, Bush has not helped Romney at all throughout the campaign. From Bush’s tepid endorsement of the Republican nominee — telling reporters “I’m for Mitt Romney” as a set of elevator doors closed on him — to his almost complete absence from the Republican convention and campaign trail, Bush and Romney seem to have come to a mutual understanding: the less mention of the years 2000-2008, the better.
There’s a simple reason that Clinton is seemingly omnipresent in this campaign, while Bush can’t even be found in this country: Clinton is one of the most popular political figures in America, while Bush is one of the most reviled. Romney has steadfastly avoided Bush — and will continue to do so in the campaign’s final days — because if the campaign is framed as a choice between eight more years of Clinton or eight more years of Bush, it would be a landslide.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, October 31, 2012
“The Case Of The Missing Ex-Presidents”: GOP Repudiate’s It’s Past For Sins Against Republicanism
Tom Toles’s typically terrific editorial cartoon in today’s Post highlights a fundamental difference between today’s Democratic and Republican parties: The Democrats welcome their former presidents to their conventions; the Republicans don’t. The reason isn’t just that Bill Clinton is the best campaign speaker since World War II and George W. Bush is far less rhetorically compelling. It’s also that the Democrats are comfortable with their past while today’s Republicans repudiate theirs.
Clinton and Jimmy Carter have been fixtures at Democratic conventions since their presidencies ended, though Carter, whose presidency Democrats, like most Americans, don’t remember all that fondly, is usually trotted out nowhere near prime time. You have to go back all the way to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democratic ex-president who wasn’t included in convention proceedings: In 1972 (the only convention that occurred while Johnson was out of office and still alive), the debates over the Vietnam War, like the war itself, were still raging, and Johnson’s appearance would have proved hugely divisive at the convention that nominated George McGovern.
But what sins against Republicanism did today’s two Republican ex-presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W., commit? Both were mainstream Republicans of their times. Papa Bush presided over the death of Soviet Communism, and even if he wasn’t really responsible for its demise, you’d think that would be worth at least an appearance. But then, Papa Bush also raised taxes, which appears to have cast him into an ideological wasteland for today’s anti-tax Republicans.
As for the son, he promoted and signed into law massive tax cuts for the rich and did nothing to rein in the banks even as they did everything they could to magnify the risk they posed to themselves and everybody else. In other words, he followed Republican economic doctrine to the letter. He chose to wage a war of choice in Iraq, a war also sought by his party’s neo-conservatives. You might think that the fact that each of these policies ended in disaster would be reason enough for the Republicans not to invite W., but for the fact that these are still the policies that the party embraces (tax cuts for the rich, repeal of Dodd-Frank and attacking Obama for not doing more in Syria).
Bush’s banishing looks more like a case of ideological deviation than real-world catastrophe. He supported a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. He expanded Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit. (Obamacare, which the Republicans universally vow to repeal, provided more funding for that benefit.)
In other words, what’s wrong with the Bushes is the same thing that was wrong with Senators Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett, longtime party stalwarts whose routine bids for renomination were denied by Republican primary and caucus voters: they haven’t kept up with the party’s race to the right. The GOP base has banished the previous generation of Republican leaders for their lack of revolutionary zeal.
The tea partyization of the GOP has a lot in common with a sustained revolution, such as, to cite the paradigmatic example, that in France, where the Marats and Dantons, yesterday’s leaders, were cast aside for and by the even more zealous Robespierre and his ilk. The Republicans are Jacobins, and Jacobins don’t invite their old presidents back. When you’ve moved as far to the extremes as today’s GOP, even your own former leaders are the ancien regime.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 6, 2012
“Religious Symbolism”: Republicans’ Holy War On The DNC Platform
Republican and conservative complaints about the Democratic platform have crystallized in the last two days. The two main themes are pure questions of religious symbolism. If this election is about the economy, as Republicans constantly assert that it is, then their attacks on the DNC are way off topic.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Emergency Committee for Israel blasted out an article from the Free Beacon, a conservative website, complaining about the Democratic platform. ECI called it, “another shift by the Obama administration away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.” It is not entirely fair to call the language in the DNC platform an act of the Obama administration. The Republican Party platform, for example, calls for banning abortion in all cases, with no exceptions. Mitt Romney, however, is running a platform that would ban abortion except in cases of rape and incest and where the life of the pregnant woman is endangered. But, it’s fair to say there is some association between the party’s platform and its presidential nominee, and that the nominee has some influence over the text of the platform.
So, what is the objectionable portion of the platform? It does not mention Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, nor does it specify that the descendants of Palestinian refugees should be settled in a Palestinian state, not Israel proper, and it also does not condemn Hamas. The 2008 DNC platform did all of these things. Romney issued a statement complaining just about the Jerusalem question. The Romney campaign also sent out statements from its two token Jewish surrogates, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) and former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), attacking Obama on all three fronts.
When asked by The Nation for a response, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson wrote in an e-mail:
The Obama Administration has followed the same policy towards Jerusalem that previous U.S. Administrations of both parties have done since 1967. As the White House said several months ago, the status of Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians—which we also said in the 2008 platform. We will continue to work with the parties to resolve this issue as part of a two state solution that secures the future of Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people.
Meanwhile, the theocratic partisan propagandists at Fox News are decrying the absence of the word “God” from the DNC platform. As Media Matters notes, Fox downplayed the significance of the GOP’s platform, in order to minimize the public’s revulsion at extremist planks such as the one on abortion. But when it came to this non-issue, they couldn’t get enough of it.
Neither of these lines of attack is likely to resonate with swing voters. Rather, they are meant to rev up the evangelical right-wing base, which obsessively pushes religion into the public square and wants to expand Israel’s boundaries to fulfill a supposed biblical prophecy.
The Republican National Convention had two themes—that the GOP would tackle the biggest issues facing the country, and that it would try to expand beyond its base. These petty attacks do neither.
Update: On Wednesday night the DNC—reportedly at President Obama’s behest—amended its platform to reinstate the language from its 2008 platform regarding Jerusalem.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, September 5, 2012
“The GOP’s Dangerous Animals”: Mitt Romney Needs To Keep The Animals In Their Enclosures
At this week’s Republican National Convention, a pair of attendees found a novel game to play: They threw nuts at a black camera operator for CNN and told her, “This is how we feed animals.”
Convention officials evicted the tossers, who, like almost all of the delegates in the Tampa Bay Times Forum, were white. The Romney campaign condemned the antics as “deplorable” and “reprehensible.”
It’s good to know that some behavior on the far right exceeds Mitt Romney’s tolerance, but this episode of “animal” feeding was, well, peanuts compared with the broader issues restraining racial politics in the party. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Romney became more than the Republican Party’s nominee for president; he became its zookeeper. To win the presidency and to become successful in the Oval Office, Romney must keep the animals in his own party in their enclosures — and that’s no easy task.
Hours before Romney’s speech, about 100 GOP delegates from the Western states assembled for a “special reception with elephants” at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, hosted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the state GOP. There, in the faux-adobe Safari Lodge, delegates mingled with Chanel the East African crowned crane, Pita the South American porcupine, Bo the African martial eagle — and Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arpaio, you’ll recall, is the guy who claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery, who calls for the arrest and deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, who is being sued for racial profiling, and who has been an outspoken champion of the Arizona immigration crackdown largely invalidated by the Supreme Court.
At the zoo, Arpaio argued that there is no daylight between him and Romney. “The governor’s stance corresponds with my stance,” the sheriff said. “Everything he says, I agree with him.” He further boasted that he was Romney’s “campaign guy in Arizona” in 2008 and that he conferred with Romney during this year’s debates, during which Romney buried other opponents for being insufficiently tough on immigration.
Arpaio justifiably took credit for establishing the party’s position on immigration. “I don’t know how to say this without being egotistical,” he said, but “I have a lot of support across the nation from all these delegates.” Asked if he was hurting Republicans, he scoffed. “If I’m hurting the party, why did all the people running for president either visit my office or call me?” he asked. “And they all want my endorsement.”
He’s right — and it’s a shame Romney won’t send Arpaio where convention officials sent the nut-throwers. Romney needs urgently to broaden his appeal beyond the white faces on the convention floor, and he made a nod in that direction in his acceptance speech, reminding delegates that “we are a nation of immigrants.” Romney’s advisers filled the program with leaders of color such as Marco Rubio, Condi Rice, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley.
But such gestures are easily undone by others. Romney has long lacked the courage to stand up to the more dangerous beasts on the right, from birther Donald Trump to the woman who accused President Obama of “treason.” In some cases, Romney has encouraged these sinister elements, with his recent quip in Michigan that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” and his false claim that Obama is gutting welfare reform. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got into a tense standoff with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus this week when he accused Romney of playing the “race card.” Priebus called that “garbage.”
No, “garbage” is what Arpaio was tossing around at the zoo on Thursday afternoon. The sheriff let everybody know “my mother and father came from Italy — legally, of course.” And he gave them an update on Obama’s birth certificate. “We’re just looking at forged documents,” he said. “Fraud, that’s what we’re looking at.”
He discussed his round-’em-up views on illegal immigrants, he voiced his opposition to driver’s licenses or other benefits for the children of illegal immigrants, and he assured his audience that Romney was of like mind. “He’s not just talking,” Arpaio said. “I’m convinced that, the first year at the White House, he will bring this issue out.”
It’s easy to dismiss Arpaio as, er, nuts. He went on a paranoid rant about how “I’ve got demonstrators I hear out there. . . . They’re the same ones who go in front of my church.” But there wasn’t a single demonstrator outside.
Romney should be making clear that Arpaio doesn’t speak for his Republican Party any more than the nut-throwers do. Instead, the sheriff wore a convention floor pass that said “honored guest.”
BY: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2012
“There Goes Lyin’ Ryan”: Marathon Runner, Marathon Liar
The latest controversy involving Rep. Paul “Lyin’” Ryan concerns whether, in a recent interview, willfully misrepresented the time it took him to run a marathon, some 20-odd years ago. He claims it was under three hours, but apparently it was actually over four. While I do believe he’s probably deliberately lying here, rather than innocently “misremembering” (runners tell me they remember their marathon times like other people remember their SAT scores), normally I think it would be way too petty to make a big deal out of it.
However, given that: 1) for some time now, Ryan has had a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth, a reputation that notably enhanced by his convention address, a speech that was unusually mendacious even by the standards of the contemporary G.O.P.; and 2) during the 2000 election, the Republicans, and (especially) their enablers in the mainstream media, hung Al Gore for far less (see here, for example), I think going after Paul Ryan for this is totally fair game.
Yes, it’s trivial BS. And no, I don’t by any means believe that this should be the focal point of attacks on Paul Ryan — the fact that he and his party are such ruthless champions of the immiseration of working people should be the main focus of said attacks, always.
That said, ridicule is a powerful weapon, and one which progressives should not shy away from (though sadly, some of the more misguidedly high-minded ones among us do). Besides, if you think I’m going to pass up the opportunity to crack snarky Rosie Ruiz jokes at Ryan’s expense, you are so, so wrong. Clearly!
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 1, 2012
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