“Believe Me Because I Said So”: Mitt Romney Goes From Etch A Sketch To Sketchy
“Lead from behind” may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate’s wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him into confusing petulance with strength.
For Obama’s supporters, the fact that the president played offense, had a strategy and seemed happy in his work was reason enough for elation. But the most electorally significant performance was Romney’s. Under pressure this time, the former Massachusetts governor displayed his least attractive sides. He engaged in pointless on-stage litigation of the debate rules. He repeatedly demonstrated his disrespect for both the president and Candy Crowley, the moderator. And Romney was just plain querulous when anyone dared question him about the gaping holes in his tax and budget plans.
Any high school debate coach would tell a student that declaring, “Believe me because I said so,” is not an argument. Yet Romney confused biography with specificity and boasting with answering a straightforward inquiry. “Well, of course, they add up,” Romney insisted of his budget numbers. “I — I was — I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years, and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget.” Romney was saying: Trust me because I’m an important guy who has done important stuff. He gave his listeners no basis on which to verify the trust he demanded.
Romney’s stonewalling was so obvious that it opened the way for one of Obama’s most effective lines of the evening: “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 have taken such a sketchy deal. And neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.” Obama sought to make that point in the last debate. This time he had a metaphor and a story to go with the arithmetic.
Romney also covertly disclosed that he, like George W. Bush before him, has every intention of cutting taxes on the rich. Like Bush, he used stealthy language to try to achieve a great fiscal coverup.
Here was Romney on Tuesday: “I will not, under any circumstances, reduce the share that’s being paid by the highest-income taxpayers.” Here was Bush in 2000: “After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes [than] they do today.”
This really matters: Romney intends, as Bush did, to push for steep tax cuts for the wealthy. His only pledge is that he’ll keep the share of the total tax take paid by the wealthy unchanged, presumably by reducing other taxes too. And this is supposed to lead to lower deficits? How?
The most instructive contrast between Debate I and Debate II was the extent to which Romney’s ideas crumbled at the slightest contact with challenge. Romney and Paul Ryan are erecting a Potemkin village designed to survive only until the polls close on Nov. 6. They cannot say directly that they really believe in slashing taxes on the rich and backing away from so much of what government does because they know that neither idea will sell. So they offer soothing language to the middle class, photo ops at homeless programs to convey compassion and a steady stream of attacks on Obama, aimed at shifting all the attention his way.
For his part, Obama looks strong when he calmly and methodically confronts the exceptionally large philosophical and practical differences that now divide the parties. He looks weak when he fuzzes up those differences in the hope of avoiding conflict. The fight is often asymmetric because Obama speaks for balance — between tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, between a thriving market and an active government — while today’s conservatives have no interest in balance.
In the first debate, Obama let Romney back into the race by failing to shake his opponent’s self-presentation. But Romney also put himself into contention by pretending to be a moderate, shelving his plutocratic side and hiding his party’s long-term objectives.
In the second debate, the disguise fell. Romney revealed more of himself than he wanted to and asked voters to endorse a radical tax-cutting program without providing them the details that matter. Sketchy is one word for this. Deceptive is another.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 17, 2012
“Mitt Romney The Product”: A New Romney Appears On A Monthly, Weekly And Sometimes Daily Basis
As he tries to engineer a comeback in this week’s presidential debate, President Obama needs to recognize two things. First, when it comes to politics, Mitt Romney treats himself as a product, not a person. Second, Republicans cannot defend their proposals in terms that are acceptable to a majority of voters.
You can imagine Romney someday saying: “Politicians are products, my friend.” There’s no other way to explain why a candidate would seem to believe he can alter what he stands for at will. His campaign has been an exercise in identifying which piece of the electorate he needs at any given moment and adjusting his views, sometimes radically, to suit this requirement.
In that respect, Romney does Richard Nixon one better. When Nixon was looking to revive his career in the 1968 campaign, the terribly scarred veteran of so many political wars realized his old persona wouldn’t sell. And so he created what came to be known as the “New Nixon” — thoughtful, statesmanlike and tempered. The operation worked until Nixon’s old self got him into trouble.
But manufacturing the New Nixon took years of painstaking effort. New Romneys appear on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis. Thus did Romney move far to the right on immigration last year because he needed to dispatch nomination rival Rick Perry, a moderate on that one issue. Since then, Romney has been trying to backtrack to appease Latino voters.
During the same nomination battle, Romney abruptly changed his tax policy to placate the supply-side-Wall-Street-Journal-Grover-Norquist axis in the GOP. Romney’s initial tax proposal was relatively modest. The right wasn’t happy. No problem, said Romney, and out came his new tax plan that included a 20 percent cut in income tax rates, “rate cuts” being a term of near-religious significance to supply-siders.
Romney pointedly asserted (again, in the primaries) that he wanted the tax cut to go to everyone, “including the top 1 percent.” But this doesn’t sell to swing voters now, especially after the leaked video in which Romney wrote off 47 percent of Americans as incorrigibly dependent. So in the first debate, Romney tried to pretend that he didn’t want to cut rich people’s taxes. He reassured us that “I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.” (By the way, he could cut taxes for the rich a lot and still keep their “share” of the government’s overall tax take the same.)
And then there’s abortion, an issue about which you have to wonder if Romney cares at all. Without much effort, you can find video online in which Romney declares with passion and conviction that he is absolutely committed to a woman’s right to choose — and video in which he declares with equal passion and conviction that he is absolutely opposed to abortion and committed to the right to life. Just recently, Romney moved again, offering this shameless gem of obfuscation to the Des Moines Register editorial board: “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.” There is no candidate I am familiar with who has tried to have as many positions on abortion in one lifetime as Mitt Romney.
But there’s an underlying reason for Romney’s shape-shifting. It’s the same reason Rep. Paul Ryan always resorts to impressive-sounding budget speak and mathematical gobbledygook to evade explaining the impact of his budgets on actual human beings.
Romney, Ryan and the entire right know that their most deeply held belief — the one on which they won’t compromise — is rejected by the vast majority of Americans. That’s their faith that every problem in the economy and in society can be solved by throwing more money at rich people through tax cuts.
Vice President Biden kept Ryan on the defensive during most of Thursday night’s debate precisely because he refused to let anything distract him from driving this central point home. Without pause and without mercy, Biden kept bringing viewers back to the obsession of the current Republican Party with “taking care of only the very wealthy.”
Obama doesn’t have to look angry or agitated in this week’s debate. He simply needs to invite voters to see that Romney, the product, will give them no clue as to what Romney, the person, might do as president. Romney keeps changing the packaging because he knows that the policies inside the box are not what voters are looking for.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 14, 2012
“Populist Mitt”: Does Romney Want to Raise Taxes On The Wealthy?
At last night’s debate, the mathematical impossibility of the Romney tax plan came up, just as it did during the first Obama-Romney debate, and just as it surely will in the second Obama-Romney debate on Tuesday. The real problem with Romney’s proposal, though, isn’t just that it’s mathematically impossible, but that it’s logically strange in one important way nobody seems to have noticed yet, namely that Romney seems to be proposing big tax increases for the wealthy. I’ll get to why that is in a minute, but before I do let’s review the problem. Since Kevin Drum gave a nice explanation, I’ll just steal it:
Romney has promised a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut, which includes people making over $200,000 per year. This would reduce tax revenues by about $251 billion per year.
But wait! What about the economic growth this will unleash? That’s mostly mythical, but let’s bend over backwards here. If you incorporate the growth estimate of one of Romney’s advisors, Greg Mankiw, Romney’s rate cuts would only cost about $215 billion per year.
Next, try to pick out a set of deductions and loopholes that can be closed to make up for this revenue loss.
But wait! Romney hasn’t said exactly which deductions he would target. So it’s not fair to pick and choose specific deductions. Fine. Instead, let’s assume that Romney completely eliminates every single deduction for high earners. All of them. It turns out this would make up $165 billion per year.
So even under the best possible assumptions, Romney’s plan would cut taxes on the rich by $50 billion per year.
But Romney says he won’t cut taxes on the rich.
If you want a lengthier explanation of all this, Josh Barro gives it here. To sum up: Romney’s now-emphatic promise that he won’t cut taxes for the wealthy (“I cannot reduce the burden paid by high-income Americans,” he said during his debate with Obama, “So any — any language to the contrary is simply not accurate”) is just impossible to keep if he’s actually going to also reduce their taxes by 20 percent. And that’s where we get to the crazy part. Here’s what I would ask Mitt Romney if I had the chance:
You say you want to cut income tax rates for everyone, and pay for every penny by eliminating rich people’s deductions and loopholes. So if you’re paying for it by getting more money from the rich, that means the rich’s taxes are going up. If rich people’s taxes were staying the same under your plan, we wouldn’t be getting the money to pay for the across-the board rate cut for everyone. You keep saying wealthy people won’t see a tax cut, but what you’re actually proposing is a tax increase on the wealthy. That being the case, why go through this double bank-shot of cutting the rich’s income tax rates, then going after their deductions? If what you’re proposing is to raise taxes on the rich, why not just raise taxes on the rich, say by raising their income tax rates?
I suppose if somebody asked Romney this, he’d deliver some convoluted explanation involving tax simplification (a reasonable goal in itself, but beside the point) and the explosion of growth that will come from a tax cut. But that wouldn’t make sense either—if all those “job creators” are getting their taxes increased, won’t that hamper their ability to do their divine job-creating work? Because as Republicans never tire of telling us, if you raise taxes on job creators, the economy inevitably goes down the toilet.
So how do we account for the logical conundrum of Mitt Romney’s tax plan? Someone would have to go back and check, but I’m guessing the whole thing evolved piecemeal, in a combination of actual proposals somebody sat down and worked out, and rhetorical moves Romney made in both planned and extemporaneous contexts. After proposing the 20 percent rate cut, at some point he started promising not to cut taxes for the wealthy because he didn’t want to seem like the plutocrat the Obama campaign is making him out to be, and that backed him into a corner he now can’t get out of. I haven’t seen anybody ask him about the fact that he’s actually proposing raising taxes on the rich, even though that’s what he’s doing. Maybe when someone does, he’ll embrace his new populist self.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 12, 2012
“Dealing With The Cavities”: The Romney-Ryan Tax Loophole Fantasy
One point I mentioned during the live blog of the debate last night which I think is worth reiterating (over and over again) regarding Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s refusal to give details on half of their tax plan—don’t be fooled by their refusal to fill out the details of their plan.
To recap: Romney has proposed a 20 percent across the board income tax cut, to cut corporate taxes, and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, among other things. He claims that he will make up the lost tax revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in the tax code. This is where the $5 trillion dispute comes from about Romney’s tax plan—his tax cuts are projected to cost around $5 trillion. He argues that it’s not fair to characterize his proposal as a $5 trillion tax cut because—you’ll have to take his word on this—he’s going to offset it by closing loopholes.
Why won’t he or Ryan name the loopholes they’d be willing to close in order to pay for their massive tax cut? Because in a giant act of bipartisan magnanimousness they want to work with Congress to decide which loopholes to close. There are two things going on here.
One is that this is the political equivalent of Romney and Ryan doling out heaps of candy to the public but then saying they’ll work with the Congress to determine precisely which teeth will have to be drilled to deal with the resulting cavities. They’re willing to give out very specific goodies, in other words, and then pretend they’re being brave bipartisans by letting Congress work out the painful details of paying for them. That’s neither brave nor bipartisan.
As TNR’s Noam Scheiber noted last night on Twitter:
Why would you be specific about lowering rates 20 percent but not offsets. Wouldn’t the first part make bipartisan compromise harder too?
If they’re so intent on working with Congress, why put a specific number on one side of the tax reform equation but not the other? Why not say the goal is to lower rates by however much eliminating deductions allows but that they’ll leave the details up to Congress? The reason goes back to the origin of Romney’s tax plan in February when he was trying to win the Republican nomination. Attempting to seem bold and Reaganesque, he proposed the 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. His emphasis then was on rate cuts, including for the rich. He wanted the big bold number. Now he has to backfill the details, which bring me to the other thing going on here.
Romney’s math doesn’t work. Tax loopholes have become the modern equivalent of wasteful spending–a generic and vastly overestimated pool of money politicians can cite as offsets for their expensive policies. The Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that if you repealed all itemized deductions from the tax code (as in goodbye mortgage interest deduction), it would only pay for a 4 percent cut in tax rates.
And more specifically to Romney’s plan, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (whose findings the Romney campaign used to tout), has run the numbers and figured out that the wealthy don’t currently get enough breaks in the tax code to pay for the Romney tax cuts. In order to pay for the cuts middle class taxpayers would have to lose expenditures—more than offsetting the tax breaks they would see.
And while Romney and Ryan have talked about a half-dozen independent “studies” which defend his tax plan, they are actually not studies at all—rather they’re three blog posts, an op-ed, and a couple of white papers, one of which was written by Romney’s own economic advisers. Oh, and they don’t actually back up his plan, according to The Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien.
So understand that while Romney’s goal sounds good, it’s straight out of campaign fantasy land.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 12, 2012
“Truth-Telling As Fascism”: Is There A Better Way To Describe What Romney’s Been Doing In This Election Cycle?
It’s getting a lot of derisive attention today, but let me add my own hilarity to the general reaction to Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal column today suggesting that people in politics should never, ever, call each other “liars.” Here’s the passage being quoted most:
The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.
The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics.
Um, no. The habit of 1930s totalitarians was to either (a) ignore everything enemies say and simply exclude them because of who they are, or (b) force them to confess their perfidies, the more lurid the better. The only people I know of in U.S. politics with those unsavory characteristics are typically Republicans who have been calling their opponents “un-American” for years, and/or suggesting that anyone who doesn’t accept “constitutional conservative” policy prescriptions hates the country and God Almighty. Nobody’s trying to “eliminate” Mitt Romney “from participation in politics.” The people, myself included, who have called him a “liar” have done so because he’s, you know, on a factual basis, “lied.” It’s hard to call the massive ad campaign run by Romney accusing the Obama administration of abolishing work requirements for welfare anything other than a “lie.” Since it’s not very likely that Mitt Romney fails to grasp elementary arithmetic, his repeated assertions that there are no contradictions built into his tax proposals have risen to the level of a “lie,” as well. And as readers of Brother Steve Benen know, you can go on and on and on and on.
Sometimes people on the left accuse Romney of lying when it would be possible to accuse him of “misrepresentations” or “fudging the truth” or “serial exaggeration” and so forth. But you know what? Romney’s habit of using lies to reinforce even bigger lies (e.g., his preposterous claim that his “health care plan” would take care of the uninsured just as much as Obamacare would, or his alleged interest in governing in a bipartisan manner, or his supposed independence from the Cultural Right) kind of makes me lose interest in cutting the guy any slack in theoretically close cases. And in complaining (as his running mate did earlier this week) about Democratic attacks on his integrity, Romney hardly comes into the political court of equity with clean hands, having run hatefully negative ads on both his primary and general election opponents whenever it seemed helpful to his candidacy.
But the clincher to me is that it’s not just “liberals” who think there’s something specially mendacious about Romney’s campaign: it’s what conservatives said for months when they were searching high and low for any plausible alternative to the man, and then what they said about his general-election campaign until very, very recently. Why can’t Mitt be loud and proud about his conservative agenda? they asked over and over about the policy positions he continues to hide and distort with every breath.
If Henninger or anyone else can come up with a better way of describing what Romney’s been doing in this election cycle again and again, I’m all ears. For a while I thought about calling him “Nixonian” in his byzantine twists and turns. But after a while, this became an insult to the memory of the Tricky One. In any event, don’t call those of us who have the responsibility of truth-telling about Romney and his vast, dishonest Potemkin Village of a campaign “fascist.” Nobody’s trying to silence Mitt Romney; we’d just prefer he’d unfork his tongue a lot more often. It’s exhausting just keeping up with the man’s mendacity, or whatever you choose to call his aversion to anything like straight talk.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 11, 2012
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