“Name Droppers”: Neither Gingrich Nor Romney Has Much Claim On Ronald Reagan
The Reagan Wars are finally underway, and Newt Gingrich is getting called on his shamelessly frequentdropping of the Gipper’s name. It makes sense for the candidates — none of whom has been able to make the Republican base fall in love with them — to make such a nostalgia appeal, but there are risks to it for both frontrunners.
As Jeffrey Goldberg noted Wednesday, former Reagan assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams lashed out at Gingrich in National Review: “He voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack… Reagan.” Meanwhile, the Restore Our Future PAC, run by a former close aide to Romney, has released an ad that features a quote from the former president attacking Gingrich and noting (rather pettily) that he only appears once in Reagan’s diaries.
There’s some truth to these attacks. A quick swing through news archives shows how often he criticized the president. Abrams highlighted this quote from 1986: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail…. President Reagan is clearly failing.” He also cited Gingrich calling Reagan’s 1985 summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
That’s just a start. Here are a few selections from the vault, which seem more meaningful than scanning the index of Reagan’s diaries:
- In 1982, he was furious at Reagan for agreeing to tax increases. “As recently as April, he said, ‘I wasn’t sent to Washington to raise taxes.’ Now he’s going on television to explain why he didn’t mean it.”
- That same year, White House adviser Lynn Nofziger charged that Rep. Jack Kemp, the leader of a guerrilla band of House conservatives, was “hurting the president and the presidency.” A gleeful Gingrich retorted, “If Kemp went to Argentina tomorrow, we the rebels would go on.” He also said, “Maybe they can beat us by the sheer weight of the White House, but they do so at the cost of Reagan’s natural base.”
- Also in 1982, Gingrich found himself writing a handwritten apology to White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker, after he blasted Baker for harming Republican chances at the polls in that year’s midterm elections.
- Here he is in 1985, complaining that Reagan’s tax plan was much too far left: “The secretary of the treasury decided to make an alliance with a Chicago Democrat, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, in effect pitting the president of the United States against the very people who gave him a 49-state victory.”
- Gingrich in 1987, commenting on Reagan’s spending plan: He “is now making, domestically, the biggest mistake of his second term.”
- In 1987, after Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination was defeated and nominee Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw over revelations that he had used marijuana in the past, Gingrich blasted the Reagan administration: “We currently have no strategy, and we’re looking dumb.”
- Gingrich on the Iran-Contra Affair: “He will never again be the Reagan that he was before he blew it. He is not going to regain our trust and our faith easily.”
Gingrich spent much of the 1980s dispensing effusive praise for a supply-sider GOP presidential nominee of the decade. Here’s one quote:”the most important Republican since Theodore Roosevelt, the first Republican in modern times to show that it is possible to be both hopeful and conservative at once.” Damningly, however, he wasn’t talking about Reagan: he was referring to his friend and House colleague Jack Kemp.
But while Gingrich spent much of the 1980s pushing the GOP rightward and attacking the president when he tacked toward the center, the hard conservative pose was a new one for the Georgian. Reagan was of course the political progeny of Barry Goldwater. Gingrich recently suggested he’d supported the Arizona senator during his ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign, and while that might be true, it’s established fact that four years later, he was southern regional director for Nelson Rockefeller, the man ran against Goldwater in 1964 and whose name has become synonymous with moderate, East Coast Republicanism; he said in 1989 that he’d spent “most of [his] life” in that more centrist wing. Ed Kilgore reported last March that during Gingrich’s first two (unsuccessful) runs for the House, he actually attacked the Democratic incumbent from the left, before moving right in time for his victory in the 1978 race.
(In the same 1989 interview, Gingrich blasted Reagan’s handling of the black vote. “One of the gravest mistakes the Reagan administration made was its failure to lead aggressively in civil rights,” Gingrich said. “It cost the Republican Party. It helped cost us control of the Senate in 1986.”)
Recently, of course, the former speaker’s attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital have raised the eyebrows of conservative critics upset that Gingrich is attacking his rival from the left.
On the other hand, the Gingrich campaign is promoting a Nancy Reagan statement from 1995 — it might not be direct from the Gipper, but is the next best thing:
The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.
It’s hard to imagine, furthermore, that this is a winning battle for Romney, and not just because of his reputation as a moderate. Because he was working in the private sector in the 1980s, he didn’t have the chance to work with (or against) Reagan, but during a debate against Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994, then-Senate candidate Romney disavowed the former president is fairly clear terms. “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush,” he said. “I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
The irony in this fight over Reagan’s legacy is that — as Andrew Romano explained in Newsweek two years ago — the real man wasn’t as doctrinaire nor as conservative as partisans on both sides remember him (a fact Gingrich’s many attacks from the right above demonstrate). So the Republican race has turned into a contest between two candidates who used to be to the left of Ronald Reagan attempting to represent a party that has since moved to the Gipper’s right.
By: David Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, January 27, 2012
The Conservative Backlash Against Newt Gingrich
In a political season known for its twists and turns, this week’s twist was pretty amazing to watch: the conservative take-down of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the wake of his big win in South Carolina, the backlash began this week. There are some who believe all of this was orchestrated by the Romney campaign, but I’m not so sure. It’s not clear to me that the conservative movement likes former Gov. Mitt Romney, either. I don’t buy into the conspiracy—former Gov. Sarah Palin says the “establishment” is trying to “crucify” Gingrich, as she defended the First Dude’s endorsement of Newt—I just think that conservatives who have never liked Speaker Gingrich but have been holding their tongues suddenly realized that he might actually have a shot at the nomination. This week, there was a Speak-Now-or-Forever-Hold-Your-Peace moment. Forever holding one’s peace didn’t look like a good idea anymore.
The anti-Newt arguments aimed at grassroots conservative voters came in rapid fire. Three were particularly persuasive, and the first of those was from George Will. If you believe that we need Gingrich because he’ll beat President Obama in the fall debates, you need to read this:
Just 11 days after finishing fourth in New Hampshire, Gingrich’s pugnacity in two debates enraptured South Carolinians, especially when he waxed indignant about the supposition that the risk-taking in his personal life–e.g., having an affair during an indignation festival against Bill Clinton–is pertinent to his fitness for the presidency. Gingrich encourages Republican voters to believe he should be nominated because he would do best in the (at most) three debates with Barack Obama. So, because Gingrich might sparkle during four and a half hours of debates, he should be given four years of control of nuclear weapons? Odd.
The second came from former Assistant Secretary of State Eliott Abrams, who was President Reagan’s point man on fighting the Sandinistas in the 1980s. In the National Review this week, Abrams recounted his personal experience with Gingrich, who opposed Abrams and the Reagan administration on fighting the Soviets; he then names other members of Congress who were far more supportive of Reagan, namely Reps. Henry Hyde, Dick Cheney, Dan Burton, Connie Mack, and Tom Delay; and then ends by quoting Gingrich insulting Reagan in a 1980s-era floor statement, all to devastating effect.
As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.
The third hit came from R. Emmet Tyrrell, the former publisher of the conservative American Spectator magazine. If you believe that we need Newt Gingrich as our nominee because of his big ideas and above-average intelligence, you need to read “William Jefferson Gingrich” by Tyrrell. He compares the former president and the former speaker, after admitting that he first noticed nearly two decades ago that “Newt Gingrich is conservatism’s Bill Clinton, but without the charm”:
Newt and Bill, as 1960s generation self-promoters, share the same duplicity, ostentatious braininess, a propensity for endless scrapes with propriety and the law. They are tireless hustlers. Now Newt is hustling my fellow conservatives in this election. The last time around he successfully hustled conservatives in the House of Representatives and then the conservatives on the House impeachment committee.
So the three biggest attributes that Gingrich supporters point to as evidence of his electability—his skill in debates, his support of Reaganism, and his intellectual prowess—were eviscerated not by moderates aligned with Romney but by the most widely-read conservative columnist, a former high-level Reagan official, and one of the most popular conservative publishers of the last two decades. These weren’t the only ones to come forward this week; there were others as well. The tide is turning against Newt Gingrich, and in any other election year, I’d say if he loses Florida, Gingrich is probably finished. He’s taken a big hit from conservatives on the right. But this isn’t any normal election year, and who knows where we’ll be even a week from now. Stay tuned.
By: Mary Kate Cary, U. S. News and World Report, January 27, 2012
What John Boehner Considers “Almost Un-American”
Over the weekend, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) described President Obama’s State of the Union address, which he had not heard, as “pathetic.” Today, Boehner pushed the rhetorical envelope a little further.
House Speaker John Boehner Tuesday forcefully denounced the Democrats’ campaign theme that they are for the middle class and Republicans are for the wealthy — saying the policies the president is running on are “almost un-American.”
“This is a president who said I’m not going to be a divider, I’m going to be a uniter, and running on the policies of division and envy is — to me it’s almost un-American,” said Boehner.
Even for Boehner, this kind of rhetoric is cheap and inappropriate.
At a certain level, it’s tempting to think the Speaker doesn’t even believe his own nonsense. What is it, exactly, that Boehner finds so offensive about President Obama’s message? The notion of a Democratic president championing the interests of the middle class isn’t exactly unusual, neither is the prospect of asking the very wealthy to pay a little more to help guarantee opportunities for all.
Indeed, there’s nothing in the White House’s agenda that wouldn’t have generated significant support from Democrats and moderate Republicans for the better part of the 20th century. Obama’s economic vision is, at a fundamental level, about as mainstream as you can get.
It makes sense for Boehner to attack this, to the extent that he sees it as his job to reflexively oppose everything the president is for. But officials, especially those in key positions of authority, really ought to avoid words like “un-American.” Just because the House elected an oft-confused Speaker, who lacks a cursory understanding of public policy and history, is no excuse for American leaders questioning other American leaders’ patriotism.
I’m reminded of a recent piece from Tim Dickinson:
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary — and that’s crazy.”
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan — which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits — is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
I suppose the follow-up question for Boehner is, was Reagan “almost un-American,” too? Were the lawmakers from both parties who approved tax reform in the mid-80s a bunch of socialist sell-outs?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 24, 2012
The Roots Of Bain Capital In El Salvador’s Civil War
A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s
Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.
Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.
In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.
A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.
Back in 1984, wealthy Salvadoran families were looking for safe investments as violence and upheaval engulfed the country. The war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a right-wing government backed by the Reagan administration, ultimately left over 70,000 people dead in the tiny nation before a peace deal was brokered by the United Nations in 1992. The vast majority of violence, a UN truth commission later found, was committed by rightist death squads and the military, which received U.S. training and $6 billion in military and economic aid. The Reagan administration feared that El Salvador could become a foothold for Communists in Central America.
The notorious death squads were financed by members of the Salvadoran oligarchy and had close links to the country’s military. The death squads kidnapped, tortured, and killed suspected leftists in urban areas fueling an insurgency that retreated to rural areas and waged war on the government from the countryside. The war, which lasted 12 years, triggered an exodus that brought more than 1 million Salvadorans to the United States.
There is no evidence that any of Bain Capital’s original investors were involved in these sorts of activities. But the identities of some of the investors remain secret, and there are family names that raise questions.
Four members of the de Sola family were among the original Bain investors, or “limited partners” in the company, the Globe reported. Their relative and “one-time business partner,” Orlando de Sola, was an important figure in El Salvador. A well-known right-wing coffee grower with an (in his words) “authoritarian” vision for the country, de Sola spent time living in Miami but was also a founding member of the right-wing Arena party, lead by a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer named Roberto D’Aubuisson.
Craig Pyes, an investigative reporter then with the Albuquerque Journal, wrote a series on the rightist death squads based on extensive on-the-ground reporting in El Salvador in the early 1980s with Laurie Becklund of the Los Angeles Times, while the death squads were still active.
Pyes, who has since won two Pulitzer Prizes and is now a private investigator in California, says that no one has produced any proof that de Sola directly funded death squads.
“However,” Pyes says, “he was in the inner circle of the group around D’Aubuisson at the time that D’Aubuisson was well known to be involved in the death squads. De Sola’s name appears in a December 1983 FBI cable as one of 29 people suspected by State Department officials of furnishing funds and weapons to Salvadoran death squads.”
De Sola’s name also turned up in a notebook, seized from an aide to D’Aubuisson named Saravia, that detailed the finances of D’Aubuisson’s terrorist network, according to Pyes.
The Saravia notebook, reviewed by U.S. officials, listed weapons purchases, payments, and what appear to be descriptions of violent plots by rightists, including the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Asked about the notebook by the New York Times in the late 1980s, de Sola denied that he had ever helped finance political violence. De Sola could not be reached for comment for this story.
Romney, for his part, who was much more accessible to the press in 1994, told the Globe that year that “we investigated the individuals’ integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives.” He also said that Bain had checked the names of the Bain investors with the U.S. government. Given the policy of the Reagan administration at the time, though, it’s not clear going to the government would have been the most effective vetting mechanism.
It’s impossible to fully explore the backgrounds of the original Bain investors because we don’t know all their identities, including the names of the four members of the de Sola family mentioned by the Globe. Neither the Romney camp, Bain Capital, nor Strachan — the Bain executive who recruited the Central Americans — responded to requests for comment.
During his first presidential bid in 2007, Romney more than once touted the Central American investors in Bain while trying to woo Hispanic voters. In a speech in March of that year to the Miami-Dade Lincoln Day Dinner, Romney actually specified five of the original “partners” in Bain Capital — but the de Sola family was not among those he named.
And that August he told the Miami Herald, “The investments for the company that I started, Bain Capital, came largely from Latin America. My largest single investors came from El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia and Guatemala. And so I feel a deep kinship to people in Latin America.”
By: Justin Elliott, Salon, January 20, 2012
“Taxes At The Top”: Low Taxes On The Very Rich Are Indefensible
Call me peculiar, but I’m actually enjoying the spectacle of Mitt Romney doing the Dance of the Seven Veils — partly out of voyeurism, of course, but also because it’s about time that we had this discussion.
The theme of his dance, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is taxes — his own taxes. Although disclosure of tax returns is standard practice for political candidates, Mr. Romney has never done so, and, at first, he tried to stonewall the issue even in a presidential race. Then he said that he probably pays only about 15 percent of his income in taxes, and he hinted that he might release his 2011 return.
Even then, however, he will face pressure to release previous returns, too — like his father, who released 12 years of returns back when he made his presidential run. (The elder Romney, by the way, paid 37 percent of his income in taxes).
And the public has a right to see the back years: By 2011, with the campaign looming, Mr. Romney may have rearranged his portfolio to minimize awkward issues like his accounts in the Cayman Islands or his use of the justly reviled “carried interest” tax break.
But the larger question isn’t what Mitt Romney’s tax returns have to say about Mitt Romney; it’s what they have to say about U.S. tax policy. Is there a good reason why the rich should bear a startlingly light tax burden?
For they do. If Mr. Romney is telling the truth about his taxes, he’s actually more or less typical of the very wealthy. Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the 400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available, these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes — major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400 filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers.
The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1 percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment.
Defenders of low taxes on the rich mainly make two arguments: that low taxes on capital gains are a time-honored principle, and that they are needed to promote economic growth and job creation. Both claims are false.
When you hear about the low, low taxes of people like Mr. Romney, what you need to know is that it wasn’t always thus — and the days when the superrich paid much higher taxes weren’t that long ago. Back in 1986, Ronald Reagan — yes, Ronald Reagan — signed a tax reform equalizing top rates on earned income and capital gains at 28 percent. The rate rose further, to more than 29 percent, during Bill Clinton’s first term.
Low capital gains taxes date only from 1997, when Mr. Clinton struck a deal with Republicans in Congress in which he cut taxes on the rich in return for creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And today’s ultralow rates — the lowest since the days of Herbert Hoover — date only from 2003, when former President George W. Bush rammed both a tax cut on capital gains and a tax cut on dividends through Congress, something he achieved by exploiting the illusion of triumph in Iraq.
Correspondingly, the low-tax status of the very rich is also a recent development. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, the top 400 taxpayers paid close to 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, and even after his tax deal they paid substantially more than they have since the 2003 cut.
So is it essential that the rich receive such a big tax break? There is a theoretical case for according special treatment to capital gains, but there are also theoretical and practical arguments against such special treatment. In particular, the huge gap between taxes on earned income and taxes on unearned income creates a perverse incentive to arrange one’s affairs so as to make income appear in the “right” category.
And the economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity. During that first Clinton term, when the very rich paid much higher taxes than they do now, the economy added 11.5 million jobs, dwarfing anything achieved even during the good years of the Bush administration.
So Mr. Romney’s tax dance is doing us all a service by highlighting the unwise, unjust and expensive favors being showered on the upper-upper class. At a time when all the self-proclaimed serious people are telling us that the poor and the middle class must suffer in the name of fiscal probity, such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 19, 2012
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