“Mitt Romney’s Terrible Laugh”: He Knows What He’s Saying Is Utter Baloney And He Knows That We Know
Some public figures get defined by a single image, or a single statement (“Ask not what your country can do for you”; “I am not a crook”). Others have a characteristic linguistic tic or hand gesture that through repetition come to embody them; think of Ronald Reagan’s head shake, George W. Bush’s shoulder-shimmy, or that closed-fist-with-thumb-on-top thing Bill Clinton used to do.
For Mitt Romney, it’s the laugh. I’m sure that at times Romney laughs with genuine mirth, but you know the laugh I’m talking about. It’s the one he delivers when he gets asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, or is confronted with a demand to explain a flip-flop or a lie. It’s the phoniest laugh in the world, the one New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote “sounds like someone stating the sounds of laughter, a staccato ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.'” Everything Mitt Romney is as a candidate is distilled within that laugh—his insincerity, his ambition, his awkwardness, and above all his fear. When Mitt laughs that way, he is not amused. He is terrified. Because he knows that what he’s saying is utter baloney, and he knows that we know it.
So he pretends to find it hilarious that an interviewer wants him to explain why, say, Romneycare was great for Massachusetts but the nearly identical Obamacare is a Stalinist horror for America. Perhaps it is the pain of enacting this facsimile of delight so many times that has hardened Mitt’s heart and allowed him to run what has become a campaign of truly singular dishonesty. But whatever moral calculation underlies the decisions he makes, this is the place we have arrived: There may have never been a more dishonest presidential candidate than Mitt Romney.
I say “may,” because measuring dishonesty with any precision is an extraordinarily difficult challenge, perhaps an impossible one. But by almost any standard of mendacity we could devise—the sheer quantity of lies, the shamelessness with which they are offered, the centrality of those lies to the candidate’s case to the voters—Romney has made enormous strides to outdo his predecessors.
It started before he even began his campaign, when Romney wrote an entire book premised on a lie about Barack Obama. Romney’s pre-campaign book, called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, was built on the idea that Barack Obama makes a habit of apologizing for America, and Mitt Romney would do no such thing. “Never before in American history,” Romney wrote, “has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined.” The actual number of times Barack Obama has gone before a foreign audience to apologize for American misdeeds is zero, as has been extensively documented. Undaunted, Romney began his campaign by repeating the lie of the Obama “apology tour” hundreds of times, before audiences all across the land.
And that was just the beginning. If you have the better portion of a day, you could wade through the lengthy catalogue of deceptions blogger Steve Benen has assembled under the heading “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity.” Periodically, Benen puts together 20 or so Romney falsehoods for a post; his latest installment is the 29th in the series.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of things Romney says are clearly, factually false and seem to come out of no place other than the “this is the kind of thing a socialist like Obama would do” corner of Romney’s imagination, as when he claimed that Obama raised corporate tax rates (nope), or alleged that “President Obama is shrinking our military and hollowing out our national defense” (the military budget has increased every year Obama has been in office). Others are bizarrely false, as when he has said multiple times that the Obama administration hasn’t signed any new trade agreements (since Obama took office we have new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia). Others sound like they just popped into his head and felt true, even though they’re utterly wrong (“We are the only people on the earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem”). Some things he says are technically matters of interpretation, but are so absurd that no honest person could say them, as when he claims that under Obama, “we’re only inches away from no longer being a free economy.” Others are seductively specific, yet completely made up (“Obamacare also means that for up to 20 million Americans, they will lose the insurance they currently have, the insurance that they like and they want to keep”).
But what is truly notable is how often Romney has put a lie at the center of his campaign. It’s one thing to say something false in passing, perhaps when speaking extemporaneously. It’s something else to tell a lie, then repeat it again and again on the stump, then put it in a television ad broadcast across the country, then send your surrogates out to repeat it to every camera they can find.
As you’ve no doubt seen, few of Romney’s lies concern himself. He may gild a lily here and there about his record and his past, but the overwhelming portion of his deceptions are about Barack Obama—what he has said, what he has done, and what he believes (whenever you hear Romney say, “Barack Obama believes …” you can be certain he is about to say something ridiculously untrue). The new Romney attack on welfare—falsely claiming that the Obama is eliminating work requirements in the program—is only the latest, but it’s hardly the first. Before that it was “you didn’t build that,” which set a new standard in deceptive use of an out-of-context quote. Before that were a hundred smaller lies about taxes, health care, the economy, foreign policy, and nearly every other subject that could possibly come up. One wonders if at some level Romney thinks he hasn’t compromised his integrity if he only makes things up about his opponent.
This is Mitt Romney’s own sin, of course, but it’s also a failure of journalism. If reporters were really doing their jobs, they would be able to provide enough of a disincentive for lying that no candidate would feel free to mislead so brazenly and so often. They wouldn’t mince words or fall back on false balance, but would forthrightly say that Romney is lying when the facts make clear he is. And so they might provide some punishment that would actually make Romney think twice before the next time he approves an ad script that says things that aren’t true.
I doubt it’ll happen. But if reporters decide that they really need to be more direct about Romney’s mendacity, they may start confronting him about it, in some of the rare non-Fox interviews to which he consents. Should that time come, Romney will no doubt laugh. “Ha,” he’ll say. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 14, 2012
“Let The Policy Back-Tracking Begin”: Paul Ryan Says Romneycare Is an Unsustainable “Fatal Conceit”
As I noted earlier, Mitt Romney’s new vice presidential pick is “not a fan,” to use Paul Ryan’s words, of the former Massachusetts governor’s signature legislative accomplishment.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up last week a 2010 Ryan appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal where he blasted the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul, which Romney oversaw as governor, as “a fatal conceit.”
Asked if he thought Romneycare (upon which Obamacare was based) works, Ryan responded:
Not well, no. Actually, I’m not a fan of the system. … I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston and I’ve talked to a lot of healthcare folks up there. What’s happening now is because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts and now you have a bureaucracy that is having to put all these cost controls and now rationing on the system. So people in Massachusetts are saying ‘yes we have virtually universal healthcare’—I think it’s 96 or 98 percent insured. But they see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts, and so they’re frustrated with this system. … They see how this idea of having the government be the sole, you know, single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have, and then an individual mandate—it is fatal conceit. These kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts are unsustainable.
Of course it’s standard operating procedure that vice presidential picks have policy differences with the top of the ticket. See George H.W. Bush and “voodoo economics,” for example. But this disagreement is more pronounced because to date Romney has run a campaign light on policy details (the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein memorably described Romney’s agenda as being less actual policy proposals and “more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. … But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.”) In a stroke Mitt Romney made Paul Ryan the functional policy director of his campaign, making sharp policy disagreements like this one more than ordinarily salient. By the same token, it will be interesting to watch the conservative reaction as Ryan is forced to correct himself on this and any other areas of disagreement with the top of the ticket. Given the extent to which his nomination is meant to pacify a querulous base a muzzled or repentant Ryan could prove problematic.
(On the other hand, Romneycare’s broad unpopularity with his party—see the uproar this week when a Romney spokeswoman spoke positively of it—has left him largely quiet on the law’s virtues so maybe “fatal conceit” will become the campaign’s official policy position on the law.)
One other point worth mentioning on Ryan and healthcare costs: It’s interesting that he criticized cost controls since they are notably absent from his Medicare overhaul scheme. While his plan would lower spending it does so not by controlling costs but by shifting the cost from the government to senior citizens. What it does do, however, is keep the Obamacare Medicare cuts … which Romney grimly denounced in introducing Ryan. I guess that’s another area where we can look forward to a little policy back-tracking.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2012
“A Slave To The Right Wing”: Romney’s Health Care Dilemma Returns
Mitt Romney has been so busy securing his Republican base that he hasn’t had time to court independent voters, the ones who will actually decide this election. But now, probably by accident, he has an opportunity to show them that he’s something other than a slave to his party’s right wing. Will he take it?
When Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul committed the apparently unpardonable sin of praising the health care law Mitt Romney passed as governor of Massachusetts, was she making a horrible mistake that made everyone in Romney headquarters gasp in horror, or was she just reflecting what her candidate actually believes? The answer to that question would tell us where Romney is going to go from here on health care, and whether he may at long last try to find some issue on which he can convince voters he’s something more than a vessel for whatever his party’s right wing wants to do to the country.
Most everyone, myself included, initially assumed that Saul just spoke out of turn. After all, Romney had been trying to avoid any discussion of health care all through the primaries. And from a logical standpoint, there really is no good argument for him to make. Since what Romney did in Massachusetts and what President Obama did with the Affordable Care Act are identical in their major features, either they were both wise policy moves or they were both horrible mistakes, but it just can’t be the case that one was great and the other was a nightmare. That is, in fact, the argument Romney makes when he’s forced to talk about the Massachusetts reform, but you can tell he realizes how absurd what he’s saying is, and he wants to change the subject as soon as possible.
But Noam Scheiber argues that it’s oversimplified to just say that Romney has turned his back on Romneycare in order to assure Republicans that he hates Obamacare as much as they do:
As we await the Romney campaign’s decision about Saul’s fate, it’s worth reflecting on one under-reported aspect of this latest conservative blow-up: Saul was saying precisely what her superiors in the Romney campaign believe, not least of them Mitt Romney.
I spent a lot of time talking to Romney campaign officials while reporting my recent profile of Stuart Stevens, his chief strategist. The unmistakable impression I got from them is that, to this day, Romney remains extremely proud of having passed health care reform in Massachusetts.
And why wouldn’t he be? He approached a difficult problem, then came up with a solution acceptable to both parties, and by all accounts the resulting policy has been a success. There are only a small number of uninsured people left in Massachusetts, and the reform is widely popular within the state. It was without a doubt the most significant accomplishment of Romney’s one term as governor. The fact that he is running a campaign for president in which he dares not mention the best thing he did in the one job he had that was something of a preparation for the job he wants is quite insane.
Of course, it’s one thing for him to be justifiably proud of Romneycare, and it’s another for him to actually talk about it on the campaign trail. If he were to do that, it would require two things he has little desire to do: angering his base, and admitting, at least tacitly, that Barack Obama actually did something right. The former is really the biggest problem; there has not been a single occasion during this campaign (or the one he ran in 2008, for that matter), when Mitt Romney has said or done anything he thought might get the right wing of the Republican party upset. The chances that he’ll start now are slim to none.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 10, 2012
“The Last Nutball Standing”: Dancing With The Mitt That Brung Ya
Conservatives picked him, and now they have to live with him.
In the early days of the 2012 Republican primaries, many thoughtful commentators took the position that it was simply impossible for Mitt Romney to win his party’s nomination. Despite all his evident strengths as a candidate—money, the most professionally run campaign in the group, the endorsement of many establishment figures—Romney simply would not find a way to get past the fact that as governor of Massachusetts he had passed a health care plan that became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had come to see as the very embodiment of evil in the modern world. The party’s base would never abide it.
Yet he did. Without all that much trouble too. And he didn’t deal with the health care issue through some brilliant strategy, either. He made no dramatic mea culpa, and never repudiated Romneycare, at least not directly. Whenever he was asked about it he would give a convoluted and utterly unconvincing argument about how what he did in Massachusetts was great, though of course it shouldn’t be applied anywhere else, and even though the ACA is almost exactly the same as Romneycare, the latter was a pragmatic and effective policy solution while the former is an abomination so horrific that putting a copy of the bill in the same room as an American flag could cause said flag to burst into flames and be sucked through a demonic portal to the very pits of hell. Democrats shook their heads at the hypocrisy and smiled at Romney’s pain, while Republicans narrowed their eyes and listened skeptically. I feel fairly confident that there was not a single person anywhere who upon hearing Romney try to make these absurd distinctions responded with, “Well that makes sense—I’m convinced.”
And amazingly, it almost seems as if Romney thought he could get through the rest of the campaign without this coming up. Yet come up it did, when his chief campaign flak Andrea Saul responded to an ad from pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA that attacks Romney with the story of the spouse of a worker laid off from a Bain Capital-owned company who died without health insurance by saying, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” Saul was right, of course—in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country after the ACA fully takes effect in 2014, losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage. But conservatives became apoplectic that the Romney campaign would tout Romney’s greatest achievement as governor and imply that people having secure health insurance might actually be a good thing. The less thoughtful among them insisted that Romney and his team need to be “housebroken.”
All of which, I’m sure, has caused no small amount of panic at Romney headquarters. As I keep saying, it’s just incredible that Romney still has to invest so much energy in keeping his restive base in line. By this time he’s supposed to be going after independent voters, but he can’t, because every time he turns around the right has found a new reason to be mad at him.
But really, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the desiccated husk of a man they’ve turned their nominee into, a candidate terrified of his own shadow, devoid of anything resembling principle, so frantic to morph into whatever anyone wants him to be that there’s barely anything left of him at all. And it isn’t as though he was imposed on them or something–they picked him. Granted, he was running against a truly remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons; imagine being a Republican and having to explain to someone a few years from now how it came to pass that at various times, your party’s front-running candidate for the presidency of the United States was Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. But still. In the end Republicans went with Mitt Romney. He’s what they chose, and they should have known that the guy they’re looking at is exactly what they’d get.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 9, 2012
The Success Of Mitt Romney’s Health-Care Pander
Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate—the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts. The core of his speech—and of his message on health care since then—was that it’s unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said:
Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation.
Of course, this isn’t true. The Affordable Care Act maintains the private health-insurance market and requires people to buy into it if they don’t have insurance or qualify for Medicaid. If the ACA is a “one size fits all” plan, than by dint of similarity, Romneycare is the same.
It’s for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. There was no way that conservatives could really believe Romney when he made the bogus distinction between his plan and the administration’s. In the same way that discrimination is discrimination, whether it’s practiced by local, state, or federal authorities, if the requirement to purchase health insurance is tyranny, then it’s tyranny everywhere, regardless of how it’s implemented.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Not only has Romney escaped any serious harm for his (huge) role in setting the template for “Obamacare” but his constant denunciations of the law have given him credibility with actual conservatives, who now endorse the former Massachusetts governor’s logic on Romneycare. Here’s Ann Coulter, for example:
As The New York Times put it, “Mr. Romney’s bellicose opposition to ‘Obamacare’ is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there.” This is like saying state school-choice plans are “the same idea” as the Department of Education. […]
As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws—including laws banning contraception—without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally. [Emphasis mine]
It should be said that, before he flipped to the right in preparation for a presidential run, Romney insisted that his plan would make a good model for the country.
That aside, it’s simply incredible to me that conservatives would buy Romney’s ridiculous logic. But it seems that they trust Romney enough on health-care repeal to let the issue slide. Which should put a damper on liberal hopes that, if elected, Romney won’t try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. For as much as the public is skeptical of politicians—especially presidential aspirants—students of the presidency have found that presidents genuinely try to fulfill the promises they made as candidates.
If you want to know how Mitt Romney will govern, all you have to do is listen to him. And in that case, a President Romney would cater to the rich, return to the bellicose foreign policy of George W. Bush, and dismantle the social safety net, Obamacare included.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 2, 2012
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