“The Nile Is Not A River In Egypt”: Republicans Can’t Face Post-Election Reality
The Nile is not a river in Egypt; it’s the post-election operating principle for Republicans and conservatives. Rather than face reality many Republicans would rather stick their heads in the sand and complain about the voters. In his political thriller Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” If Republicans want to get on track, they need to take a hard look at themselves and not blame everything on Mitt Romney.
Many conservatives and Republicans share Romney’s disdain for voters. I like to watch the Fox News Channel when things go badly for Republicans, so I’ve been watching the Fox News Channel a lot lately. I enjoy hearing the excuses that their commentators make for the GOP. The spin out of GOP-TV is that President Barack Obama won because voters are stupid, selfish, or sinful. Now, there’s a winning campaign message for you. Conservative columnist George Will said Sunday on ABC that the Republican Party must “quit despising the American people.” I knew that if I waited long enough, I would agree with Will on something.
The national GOP candidates have also put their heads deep into the sand.
Mitt Romney jumped in immediately after Election Day to remind the public of just how clueless he is. He blamed Barack Obama for his loss. Romney told big money donors that he lost because of the president’s “gifts” to young people, blacks, and Hispanics. Most people think that the things that Romney described as gifts are just basic human rights. One of these “gifts” was ending deportation for people who came to the United States as children with undocumented parents. President Obama ended the deportation because he believed the U.S. government should not punish children for their parents’ mistakes. Voters do not share the GOP’s hostility to immigrants. Data from the national Election Day exit survey indicated that two thirds (65 percent) of the voters want to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants while only a quarter (28 percent) of the voters felt that the government should deport them.
Romney’s running mate is just as clueless. Rep. Paul Ryan said that the election was not rejection of GOP tax policies. He was wrong. The former GOP vice presidential candidate apparently didn’t read the national exit poll that showed that almost half (47 percent) of the voters want to raise taxes on Americans who live in households where the total annual income is over $250,000. A small group (13 percent) of voters want to raise everyone’s taxes and only a third (35 percent) of the electorate oppose any tax increase.
If all else fails, blame the weather. I have seen or heard a few GOP pundits say that Hurricane Sandy blew Mitt Romney off course. If Republicans believe that it was Sandy that took the wind out of Romney’s sails, they face a long winding road back to the White House.
To be fair some conservatives got it. Both Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer endorsed amnesty for undocumented workers after the election results rolled in. Good for them, they are realistic enough to fear the impact that a growing Latino population will have on the future of the GOP.
But some of the solutions that conservatives have offered aren’t particularly constructive. One of our readers @MaltaSiege suggested that “all liberals should hang themselves.” I assume that includes me. Just to be sure I got the message, Mal was kind enough to include a picture of a noose. Even if we had enough rope to hang ourselves, I don’t think the 62 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama want to leave this earthly coil now that they re-elected a president who wants to eliminate tax breaks for billionaires and who will fight to allow people to marry anyone they choose without government interference.
Not all our readers appreciate my thoughts on the condition of the GOP and the conservative movement. Years ago, I told a female friend that I had finally figured out what makes women tick. My friend replied in horror, “What do you know about women, you’re a man?” I replied “We’re all people, aren’t we?” Well, some of you may resent my comments about Republicans, since I’m a Democrat. But we’re all Americans, aren’t we?
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2012
“Romney The Detail Man”: Another Convenient Right-Wing Lie
The so-called “mainstream media” (aka The New York Times) is constantly being assailed by Republicans and the right for their supposedly liberal slant. Yet another convenient right-wing lie.
Take, for example, Saturday’s above-the-fold NY Times story, entitled (in the print edition that arrived at my home this morning): “Romney Recalled as Leader Who Savors Details.”
What?
It’s mainly a puff piece, aglow with Romney’s supposed managerial prowess. Coming just a bit more than three weeks before Election Day, it attempts to confirm Romney’s central selling point – that he can run the government better than Obama.
Nowhere does the Times bother to mention that Romney’s campaign has been devoid of any detail at all — details about his economic plan, his budget plan, his plan for what to replace Obamacare with, his plan to replace Dodd-Frank, or even details about the taxes he’s paid.
When he was governor of Massachusetts, the citizens of the Commonwealth had no idea what he was doing (I can attest because I was there, and as much in the dark as most people). He kept the details of his governing to himself and his staff. And he spent most of his last two years in office laying the groundwork for his run for the presidency.
Romney has always savored details when it helps him make money. But when it comes to running or holding office he’s been a standout for avoiding all details and keeping the public in the dark.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, October 20, 2012
“Not So Hidden”: As If Republicans Didn’t Know, President Obama’s Second-Term Agenda Is Pretty Clear
Everywhere you turn, President Obama is accused of not offering a clear second-term agenda. It’s not surprising that Republicans say it, but you also hear it from quarters sympathetic to the president.
But how true is the charge?
The president does lack a crisp, here’s-my-plan set of sound bites. What’s less obvious is whether this should matter to anyone. Mitt Romney’s five-point plan sounds good but is quite vague and, upon inspection, looks rather like five-point plans issued by earlier Republican presidential candidates. Moreover, Romney has been resolutely unspecific about his tax plans, leading to the understandable suspicion that he’s hiding something politically unsavory, either in the popular deductions he’d have to slash or in the programs he’d have to get rid of.
Obama, by contrast, has been far more straightforward about what he would do about the deficit: He wants a budget deal that includes both spending cuts and tax increases. He has put forward rather detailed deficit-reduction proposals. The centerpiece is a plan that, when combined with cuts made in 2011, would reduce the deficit by $3.8 trillion over a decade, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Obama keeps insisting (rightly) that no deal can work without new revenue, and he is upfront that he’d begin by raising taxes on Americans earning over $250,000 a year.
Some deficit hawks argue that Obama’s tax increases are not broad enough. Others are looking for steeper Medicare and Social Security cuts than Obama is willing to endorse. Many progressives, in turn, want fewer cuts and favor additional tax increases on the very wealthy. Before signing off on deeper program reductions, progressives should consider the efforts of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to counter all the proposals to cut tax rates. She has suggested five new, higher rates on incomes ranging from $1 million to $1 billion or more a year. The capital gains tax also needs to rise. Low levies on capital gains, the reason Romney paid so little tax on his $20.9 million income, raise problems for both fiscal balance and equity.
But these are responses to what Obama has proposed. To disagree with some of Obama’s specifics is to acknowledge that the specifics exist.
Some dismiss what an Obama second term might achieve by claiming that it will be mainly concerned with consolidating his first-term accomplishments. If these had been trivial, that might be a legitimate criticism. But does anyone seriously believe that implementing a massive new health insurance program that will cover an additional 30 million Americans is unimportant? Can anyone argue that translating the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms into workable regulations is a minor undertaking?
The president has also been clear that he wants to take on immigration reform. The question always asked is: Why should we think he’ll do it in a second term when he didn’t do it in the first? The answer is that if Obama is reelected, it will be in no small part because he overwhelms Romney among Latino voters who have stoutly rejected the Republican’s “self-deportation” ideas. It’s possible that Republicans will cooperate on immigration reform simply because they don’t want to keep losing elections by getting clobbered in Latino precincts. And Obama will know that he has an electoral debt to pay.
Republicans have been relentless in attacking the clean-energy projects Obama has financed. If Obama wins, the president will have reason to say that clean energy won, too, and push ahead. And in one of the best articles on what Obama might do in a second term, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza observed in June that Obama’s campaign statements — to that point, at least — suggested he would like to take another shot at legislation to address climate change.
Obama speaks incessantly about upgrading the country’s infrastructure. He also stresses the urgency of retooling both our education system and the way we train people for well-paying jobs. One can imagine a comprehensive education, jobs and investment program being a high priority in a second Obama term. And you can bet he will join efforts to create a new campaign financing system to check the power billionaires and corporations exercise in the world after Citizens United.
There is every reason to wish that Obama would pull all this together in a more inspiring way. Some of us would like him to be much bolder in addressing income inequality, the huge roadblocks to upward mobility, and the persistence of poverty. But is there is an Obama second-term agenda? Yes, there is.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2012
“A Very Sketchy Deal”: Mitt Romney’s Grab Bag Of Right-Wing Disasterous Bush Policies
Mitt Romney’s entire presidential campaign is premised on the idea that—as a former businessman—he is best qualified to fix the economy. It went unnoticed, but while talking tax reform, President Obama pushed against that with an effective attack on the shaky numbers behind Romney’s tax plan:
Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.
Since then, “sketchy deal” has become something of a catchphrase for the president; to wit, in an Iowa speech yesterday, he used it to contrast Romney’s plan with “deals” of the past:
Romney still benefits from a presumption of competence, and Obama would be well-served by hammering on the essential vapidness of Romney’s economic plan. It’s not just that his tax promises don’t add up—even with a $25,000 limit on deductions, there’s not enough revenue raised to pay for an across-the-board cut and cuts to taxes on capital gains and investment income—but that his five point plan to create 12 million jobs does nothing of the sort.
The definitive debunking was done by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who found that Romney’s numbers just don’t add up. On his website, Romney’s economic advisors say that “History shows that a recovery rooted in policies contained in the Romney plan will create about 12 million jobs in the first term of a Romney presidency.” Team Romney even goes as far as to cite exact job-creation numbers for each plank of the plan: 3 million from Romney’s energy policies, 7 million from his tax policies, and 2 million from cracking down on China.
But as Kessler shows, the Romney campaign has little evidence for any of its claims. There’s no study showing that the Romney energy plan would create 3 million jobs—at most, there’s a Citigroup report that predicts that rate of job growth over the next eight years as a result of policies already adopted (and opposed by Romney). The 7 million jobs number? It comes from a ten-year estimate of what might happen with Romney’s policies. And the 2 million jobs claim comes from a 2011 International Trade Commission report which estimates gains if China stopped infringing on American intellectual property. The problem is that the study was highly contingent on last year’s job market, which was far worse than the current one.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of Romney’s claim is the simple fact that “12 million jobs” is the current projection for job growth over the next four years under the current policies. In essence, Romney’s promise is to take credit for the results of Obama’s policies if he’s elected president.
“Sketchy deal” is the right way to describe Romney’s offer to the American public. Rather than put forth a plan to deal with our short-term economic problems, he’s offered a grab bag of right-wing proposals that are indistinguishable from the disasterous policies of the Bush administration. He’s betting that better packaging is all it takes to sell the public the same bill of goods. And judging from the close polls, he might be right.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect,October 18, 2012
“I Love Vetoes”: Mitt Romney’s False Claims Of Bipartisanship In Massachusetts
In Tuesday night’s presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mitt Romney said, “We haven’t had the leadership in Washington to work on a bipartisan basis. I was able to do that in my state.” This repeats a claim he made repeatedly in the first debate that he worked successfully in with the Democratic state legislature in Massachusetts. “Republicans and Democrats both love America,” said Romney. “But we need to have leadership—leadership in Washington that will actually bring people together and get the job done and could not care less if—if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.”
Romney also argues that an ability to work across the aisle is essential for any president, and that it is a quality he has and Obama lacks. At the first debate, Romney said, regarding a deficit reduction deal, “I think something this big, this important has to be done on a bipartisan basis. And we have to have a president who can reach across the aisle and fashion important legislation with the input from both parties.”
Romney’s surrogates have even gone so far as to offer his bipartisanship approach as the reason he will not specify what tax expenditures he will eliminate to offset the cost of his tax cuts, arguing that he should work with Congress to identify them, rather than dictating his own preferences.
During the primaries, when Romney claimed to have been “a severely conservative governor,” he never boasted of working with Democrats.
In truth, his approach in Massachusetts was neither severely conservative nor bipartisan. Democrats in the legislature held a veto-proof super-majority. That meant Romney had no choice but to play ball with them or else he would get nothing done. Sometimes he opted for the former, as in the case of healthcare reform. Often, he opted for the latter.
Looking at Romney’s record in Massachusetts one does not see bipartisanship as an operating principle. Rather than it is a tool he uses when it is convenient. Romney was not particularly good at cultivating relationships with the Democratic legislature. Former Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran told the Associated Press, “Initially [Romney’s] sense was, ‘I have been elected governor, I am the CEO here and you guys are the board of directors and you monitor the implementation of what I say.’ That ruffled the feathers of legislators who see themselves as an equal branch (of government).”
Romney’s approach to the legislature remained mostly hostile, rather than conciliatory. As NPR reports:
Romney clearly did not relish having to work with a Legislature that was 85 percent Democratic. He pushed hard during his first two years as governor to boost the number of Republicans on Beacon Hill. But that effort was a failure; Republicans ended up losing seats in the midterm elections…. Apart from health care, Romney defined success not with big-picture legislative accomplishments but with confrontation. In a 2008 campaign ad, Romney actually bragged about taking on his Legislature: “I like vetoes; I vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor,” he said.
Romney issued some 800 vetoes, and the Legislature overrode nearly all of them, sometimes unanimously.
In 2005 and 2006, after Romney decided not to run for re-election but instead to seek the Republican presidential nomination, he abandoned much of his erstwhile moderation. Massachusetts pulled out the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, abandoned his smart growth policies, and reversed his prior support for abortion rights and stem cell research. Refusing to make investments in stem cell research and renewable energy—two important sectors of Massachusetts’s economy—contributed to his abysmal record on job creation.
It is also hard to reach across the aisle when you aren’t even in town. Towards the end of Romney’s tenure, he was out of the state more than he was in it. In 2006, Romney’s last year in office, he was traveling out of state for all or part more than 200 days. During his total four years he was out of the state more than 400 days. While on the road, speaking to Republican audiences, he would frequently mock Massachusetts for its liberal politics. By the time he left office, his approval ratings back home were 34 percent.
If anything, Romney’s approach in the White House would be even more partisan and polarizing. In Massachusetts, Romney was not only governing with Democratic legislature but with a liberal electorate. What he did under those circumstances could be quite different from what he would do with a Republican Congress and a national Republican constituency.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, October 17, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 