“Throwing Crumbs To The Bottom Feeders”: Mitt Romney, The “Fighting Moderate”
The latest meme making the Beltway rounds at the urging of Mitt Romney’s staff is that their candidate has really pulled a fast one on the “conservative base” of his party: he’s a “moderate” (you know, like Bill Clinton) who’s figured out he can keep the wingnuts happy just by being a Breitbartian badass towards Obama. Give’ em Solyndra photo ops, the meme suggests, and they won’t make Romney endorse the Gold Standard or a Personhood Amendment. McKay Coppins wrote up the meme today for Buzzfeed:
The conventional wisdom of the chattering class has been that Romney is captive to the Republican Party’s conservative base, desperate and anxious to maintain their tepid support. But his new appeal to the right marks a recognition that he can court conservatives without, in any traditional sense, “tacking right.” His aggressive tactics stand in for the sort of policy compromises that could damage him in November; better, his advisers argue, to court conservatives with a press conference shouting match than with a high-profile fight over abortion or gay marriage. What’s more, they say, the media obsession with Romney “pandering” to the right represents a misunderstanding of conservatives, who can live with Romney’s moderate record – as long as he’s a fighting moderate.
So the idea here is that every time Romney pleases the crazy people by echoing one of their favorite attack lines on Obama, or simply looks the other way when they pursue craziness (e.g., Trump’s neo-birtherism), it’s a sign Mitt is actually being faithful to his “moderate” course, giving the Right bread and circuses while intending to offer swing voters—and America—that fine “moderate” governance.
If anyone buys this meme, then they’re falling for a stunt a lot more transparent than the base-tending hijinks that have supposedly fooled the right-wing rubes.
It should be enough for anyone that Romney has endorsed two large and violently immoderate measures: the Ryan budget, and Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, those twin substantive litmus tests for a candidate’s commitment to a long-term agenda focused on a radically reduced government at all levels supported by a more regressive tax system. He’s also promised to try to make abortion and same-sex marriage illegal through federal policy if possible and judicial appointments if necessary; there is nothing “moderate” about reversing 40 years of legalized abortion. And don’t get me started on Romney’s foreign policy views, which seem to combine the worst features of Dick Cheney and John Bolton.
Are there right-wing policy positions too extreme for Romney to embrace unless he has to? Of course; there always are and always will be; we’re living in a moment of movement conservative triumphalism so powerful that no one is safe of the charge of being insufficiently pure. That doesn’t make Mitt some sort of safe “centrist” alternative to Obama who’s managed to outmanuever a weak field and trick the Right into accepting his nomination, and is now tricking hard-core conservatives again by giving them the sizzle of the psychotic campaign they crave instead of the steak.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 1, 2012
“The Darkest Art Of All”: Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney did this week when he called Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.
Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”
This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.
The obvious way to do that is to call any mention of it character assassination. Are those ads really character assassination? Do they say, for example: “Mitt Romney must be a really terrible and malevolent human being to have thrown those poor steel workers out on the street”? Because that would be an attack on Romney’s character. But no, they do not. They say Mitt Romney did us dirt. They’re emotional, sure. And if you want to say emotionally manipulative, all right by me. And yes, Joe Biden took it all a step or two further with his Ohio speech, saying Romney doesn’t understand the rest of us and so on.
But come on. That’s politics. Those aren’t character attacks. They’re salvos in a debate about what kinds of capitalism are good for regular people and what kinds aren’t. Campaigns Democratic or Republican don’t exactly elevate debates, Lord knows; but if we’re going to have arguments about how our society works, that’s a pretty useful one to have.
But the character-assassination label will come in handy—and this is Romney’s second purpose—when the Republican attacks on Obama really start. Maybe Romney is telling the truth, and his campaign will be all about how Obama promised nice things and seems like a nice young man but failed to deliver on them. His polling tells him he has to campaign like that for now, because Obama is far more likable to more people than he.
Something tells me, though, that the Romney campaign will eventually lower the boom. One might argue that it has already. What’s “apologizing for America,” after all? Aside from being a cheap and contemptible lie, is it not a kind of assault on the character of the president of the United States to accuse him of doing something that he hasn’t done, especially when the accusation is obviously meant to carry treasonous connotations? Romney’s “apologizing for America” line has always told us a great deal about character—Romney’s, not the president’s.
Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.
So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.
BY: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 19, 2012
“Liberal Fascism” And Other Rightist Deceptions: The Republican Tyranny Of Cliches
It turns out that for $50 and the time it takes to fill out an application you too can be a Pulitzer Prize Award nominee. Well, actually, you can’t. All you really get for your 50 bucks is the right to call yourself a Pulitzer Prize “entrant.”
But that hasn’t stopped conservative blogger and book author Jonah Goldberg (last year’s #7 on Alex Pareene’s popular Salon “Hack List”) from falsely claiming on the dust jackets of his last two books that he’d “twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize” — until his faux honorific was exposed as (to use Pareene’s words) the “utter bullshit” it was.
According to Bill Dedman who writes for msnbc.com, when Goldberg’s “résumé inflation” was first pointed out to him, Goldberg claimed he hadn’t meant to mislead anyone and later had it removed from his National Review Online bio.
Goldberg’s publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and promised to also remove the Pulitzer reference from future reprints just as it would “any other innocent mistake brought to our attention,” reports Dedman.
I know a Pulitzer Prize winner. I work with a Pulitzer Prize winner. A Pulitzer Prize winner is a friend of mine. And you, Jonah Goldberg, are no Pulitzer Prize winner — nor even a “nominated finalist,” only three of whom are chosen in each category by Pulitzer juries out of the thousands of wanabees just like you.
But I am not surprised Goldberg would twist the meaning of words to artificially enhance his standing or the interests of those he serves since twisting words and ideas is what Goldberg does for a living. It’s why he has a job at all in the conservative movement.
Pareene calls Goldberg “a uniquely pathetic figure in contemporary conservative thought,” who wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual but is “the world’s laziest thinker.”
But to me, the National Review Online editor-at-large is a reverse barometer of everything that makes right wing conservatives most nervous about themselves.
Four years ago, when charges of actual fascism against conservatives were hitting just a little too close to home as Tea Party Republicans were veering sharply to the far right, Goldberg achieved bestseller status while throwing pursuers off the scent with his laughable, if lucrative, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It’s a book that left many puzzled reviewers wondering: “Secret History? Why secret?”
So, to judge by Goldberg’s most recent literary effort — A Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas – conservatives must be worried Americans are starting to take to heart what scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein recently said about them: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
We’re likely to see much more of this sort of thing moving forward as conservatives commission people like Goldberg to attack liberals for whatever is worst in themselves in a classic expression of “I am rubber and you are glue” projection.
But the hard truth is that liberals who believe in democracy will always be at a disadvantage against conservatives who don’t because, while respect for opponents and openness to their dissenting points of view is a defining quality of the liberal worldview, conformity to orthodoxy is at the core of the conservative one. And the strangulating rigidity only gets worse the further conservatives move to the right.
What makes neo-conservatives in particular such formidable opponents is that most of their intellectual (and genetic) forbearers began their political careers on the totalitarian left and never really abandoned its thuggish, anything goes ways in pursuit of a one-party monopoly of power — even when the one-party state they hoped to create was a rightist one.
And one of the worst offenders is the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer.
Take Krauthammer’s column just this week in which he calls President Obama a “divider-in-chief” running a “slice-and-dice” campaign.
Kruathammer’s specific complaint is the fear-mongering he accuses the President of waging whenever Obama charges Paul Ryan of wanting to cut Pell Grants by $1,000 per student, which the Ayn Rand devotee does in a House budget he calls “Pathway to Prosperity.”
The President arrived at the $1,000 figure by taking Ryan’s total non-defense discretionary cuts and applying them evenly across the board to all existing programs. Ryan says that’s not true but refuses to say why or specify how much he does intend to cut individual programs.
While Ryan keeps those cuts close to the vest so he doesn’t have to pay the political price of defending them, Krauthammer helpfully steps in to call Obama a liar for attacks against Ryan that Krauthammer says are a dishonest “fabrication” meant to be nothing more than “a great applause line.”
But as Greg Sargent points out, the White House has openly admitted it is making assumptions about Ryan’s budget in the absence of details Ryan won’t provide himself.
“Ryan wins conservative adulation from the likes of Krauthammer for his pose as a deficit scourge, even though he isn’t detailing the actual consequences of his proposed deficit reduction policies in any meaningful way,” says Sargent. “And anyone who even tries to game out the consequences of Ryan’s plan gets attacked for inventing them out of thin air. Neat trick, eh?”
There’s a reason for all this secrecy, says Sargent. “If Ryan were to spell out the consequences of his vision in any meaningful detail, it would be deeply unpopular. Similarly, any reasonable assumptions about what his vision would mean in the real world also risk making it deeply unpopular. So they must be attacked as fabrications. This is worse than a shell game. It’s a shell game without the pea.”
The Ryan Budget is a variation of the supply-side “voodoo” economics that Republicans sold to a gullible public 30 years ago. Back then, the idea that tax cuts for the rich paid for themselves allowed Republicans to cut those taxes without facing political heat from liberals for cutting popular programs or incurring the ire of traditional, green eye-shade conservatives like David Stockman, who worship God, Country and Balanced Budgets in that order.
Conservatives always knew supply-side economics was a hoax and said so privately to one another. But they understood the political value of painless tax cuts a generation ago just as today Paul Ryan understands the value of massive budget cuts to popular programs — with details To Be Named Later.
Going further, Krauthammer says Obama’s criticism of Ryan’s dishonest budget “makes a mockery” of the President’s “pose as the great transcender, uniter, healer of divisions.”
It’s touching that Krauthammer cares so much about unity considering that the Republican Party he defends is the most conservative it’s been in a century. And as Robert Draper points out in his new book on the Tea Party Republican House, conservatives were meeting the very day Barack Obama put his hand on the Bible to become America’s 44th President in order to plot not only how Republicans could win back political power but also how they could put a grinding halt to the entire Obama legislative agenda before it even got off the ground.
For the minority Republican Party that had lost the two previous national elections, “bipartisanship” meant a liberal Democratic President governing as a right wing Republican — or not at all.
“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes one Republican Congressman saying at that first strategy meeting on Inauguration Day 2009. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
As Jamelle Bouie at American Prospect explains: “In other words, there was nothing President Obama could have done to build common ground with Republicans. From the beginning, the plan was to relentlessly obstruct Obama, regardless of whether that was good for the country. The GOP’s high-minded rhetoric of compromise and bipartisanship was bunk.”
Krauthammer uses words like “divider” and “divisive” cynically like the Bolshevik-style propagandist that he is in order to score a few cheap political points not illuminate a political truth.
For the true-believing right winger, “divisiveness” on the part of adversaries is merely the mirror image of the rigid “conformity” to conservative orthodoxy which the right wing worldview demands.
And isn’t that what Krauthammer really means when he accuses Obama of hypocrisy in not finding greater unity with a party for whom the only possible unity is the one that demands abject capitulation and unconditional surrender from all those outside the Republican Party itself?
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, Salon.com, May 11, 2012
“Unjustified And Wrong”: The Poor Should Not Bear The Burden Of A Deficit They Didn’t Cause
GOP leaders in Congress who can’t stop talking about family values are proposing an array of deep cuts to food stamps, child tax credits, healthcare for the poor, and even block grants that help states with daycare and adoption assistance. Left untouched are military spending that has ballooned over the last decade and tax breaks for the richest Americans. This isn’t courageous or pragmatic. It’s fiscally irresponsible and morally wrong.
Religious leaders are not letting Rep. Paul Ryan—architect of the GOP budget proposal—get away with the fiction that this budget reflects the values of his Catholic faith. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has sent a series of letters to GOP-controlled House committees arguing that these cuts are “unjustified and wrong.” Bishops wrote this week that “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons” and bluntly conclude that “the proposed cuts to programs in the budget reconciliation fail this basic moral test.” Catholic leaders have called for “shared sacrifice,” putting “unnecessary military spending” on the table and—in a pointed critique of Republicans’ fiscal fantasy that we can balance the budget by cuts alone—reference the need for “raising adequate revenues.” When Representative Ryan recently spoke at Georgetown University, almost 90 professors and priests at the Catholic university urged him to stop distorting Catholic social teaching to advance his radical ideological agenda. Expect faith leaders to keep challenging budget proposals and economic policies that undermine bedrock principles of justice, compassion, and the common good.
We should not pit national security against economic security. An effective military and a responsive government that doesn’t turn its back on vulnerable families are both achievable if we move beyond false choices. The working poor struggling in minimum-wage jobs, the elderly, and a squeezed middle class did not cause our deficits. They should not be asked to bear the greatest burden.
By: John Gehring, Washington Whispers Debate Club, U. S. News and World Report, May 10, 2012
“Fact, Pseudo-Fact And Pure Imagination”: How Paul Ryan Escapes Scrutiny
Because of his pleasant demeanor, the Wisconsin congressman is rarely pressed on his radical agenda.
House Budget chairman Paul Ryan inhabits two, mutually exclusive spaces in Washington politics. He’s both a crusader for deficit reduction—the recipient of praise and accolades from the Beltway’s collection of deficit hawks—and a pure right-wing ideologue, whose budgets would gut the social safety net, slash taxes on the rich, and load the United States with trillions of dollars in debt. That he’s managed to do this without backlash from the Right or incredulity from the mainstream is a remarkable achievement, and as Jonathan Chait describes for New York Magazine, a product of his studied earnestness and ostentatious love of “wonkery”:
Seeming genuine is something Ryan does extraordinarily well. And here is where something deeper is at play, more than Ryan’s charm and winning personality, something that gets at the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Washington. The Ryan brand is rooted in his ostentatious wonkery. Because, unlike the Bushes and the Palins, he grounds his position in facts and figures, he seems like an encouraging candidate to strike a bargain. But the thing to keep in mind about Ryan is that he was trained in the world of Washington Republican think tanks. These were created out of a belief that mainstream economists were hopelessly biased to the left, and crafted an alternative intellectual ecosystem in which conservative beliefs—the planet is not getting warmer, the economy is not growing more unequal—can flourish, undisturbed by skepticism. Ryan is intimately versed in the blend of fact, pseudo-fact, and pure imagination inhabiting this realm.
The thing that comes across in Chait’s piece, more than anything, is the degree to which so many people simply don’t believe that Ryan is a right-wing ideologue. When given a choice between him and their lying eyes, they choose him, despite the fact that his budget would clearly result in a return to the pre-New Deal era, where government was mostly uninvolved in the economic life of the country, to the detriment of everyone.
To wit, Chait relays an interview with New York Times business columnist James Stewart, who assumes that Ryan would raise tax rates on capital gains as part of his budget plan, despite the fact that Ryan has been a vocal opponent of taxes on capital gains. Chait is baffled, and asks him to square the circle:
I asked Stewart why he believed so strongly that Ryan actually supported such a reform, despite the explicit opposition of his budget. “Maybe he’s being boxed in” by right-wing colleagues, Stewart suggested.
This is actually a problem for trying to challenge Ryan’s brand of reactionary conservatism; if the arbiters of mainstream discourse refuse to take Ryan on his stated terms—because he talks nice and works out a lot—then the public is necessarily less informed about what the Wisconsin representative wants for the United States. You can see this dynamic at work in today’s Times profile of Ryan, where we learn a lot about his popularity, his exercise regimen, and his love of noodling (catching catfish with your bare hands), and not very much about his plans or their implications.
Ryan’s ideas should discredit him—they are little more than an updated version of the policies that led us to the worst economy since the Depression. But people like to be hooked, and the earnest congressman is a great salesman.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 30, 2012
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