Would Mitt Romney’s “Competence” Really Fix Washington?
The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson offers measured praise to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign and its all-but-inevitable march to the 2012 presidential nomination.
Gerson concludes this way:
Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.
Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.
I’m not sure how Romney Competence is supposed to work in practice.
For starters, the basic instinct of conservative economic policy is that government should stay out of the way and let the Bain Capitals of the world work their creative-destructive magic. It seems to me you don’t need to have run Bain Capital in order to, as president, stay out of its way.
Maybe that’s too snarky.
Okay, then. Let’s agree that it’s not former Gov. Romney’s specific expertise as a business consultant that’s needed in Washington. What we need in a president, more generally, is someone with deeply-rooted experience as a manager or executive.
Fine.
If we’re talking about the day-to-day demands of running the government—a big, formidable, complex job—I agree.
But let’s picture President Romney, with his deep management experience, his love of data, his (as Gerson puts it) belief that the “real task of governing” is “making systems work.” Let’s picture management-systems-loving President Romney negotiating with Congress. I want to know how, exactly, does Romney Competence deal with a “system” that’s riven by ideology? How does he make that one “work”?
When it comes to budgeting and fiscal reform, there’s no lack of number-crunches and data-lovers in Washington.
Occasionally, some of them even formulate actual proposals for lawmakers’ consideration.
Why, the current president of the United States established a commission to come up with a plan to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability!
What came of it?
Nothing.
Was it a lack of competence that explains why President Obama let the Bowles-Simpson plan twist in the wind? And why the debt-ceiling and “supercommittee” negotiations tanked so ignominiously?
When Tea Partyers refuse any increases in government revenue—even if they’re generated via code simplification rather than individual rate hikes, and even when they’re accompanied by entitlement reform—are they incompetent?
Is it so-called competence that divides Republican Sen. Tom Coburn from Americans for Tax Reform activist Grover Norquist?
Or is it something else? (Hint: it begins with an “i” and ends with a “y”.)
I genuinely want to know what difference it would make to have Mitt Romney, rather than one of his rivals, in the room with Coburn and Norquist.
Is it competence that’s urgently needed—or courage?
Which occasions the question I’ve been asking all along: When has Mitt Romney ever displayed political courage?
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2012
The GOP’s Peculiar Vocabulary Of Race
If Rick Santorum is upset that pretty much nobody believed him when he said he wasn’t talking about “black people” living off “somebody else’s money,” he has Newt Gingrich to blame. A day after the GOP’s flavor of the week changed stories and claimed, “I didn’t say black,” when he said, “I don’t want to make [something sounding like black] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Gingrich again called President Obama “the food stamp president.” He told reporters in New Hampshire, “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”
On Thursday I performed the mental exercise of giving Santorum the benefit of the doubt, and laid out the way the GOP’s ’60s era rhetoric about “welfare queens” and “welfare cheats” has been updated to include much of the multiracial working class, including whites – including anyone who has a public sector job, a union-protected job, or collects unemployment, Social Security or Medicare. It seemed theoretically possible – while still hard to believe – that Santorum was merely sharing the new GOP line that we’re all welfare queens now, any of us who’ve ever benefited from a government program.
Then Gingrich made my thought exercise seem unduly kind, by demonstrating exactly why people should be inclined to distrust Santorum’s new story and believe he was talking about black people: The modern GOP seems unashamed of its prejudice.
It’s impossible not to believe that having our first black president unleashed a new round of GOP race-baiting, even leaving birtherism aside. In August, one of Obama’s few Republican friends, Sen. Tom Coburn, lapsed into shameful racial stereotyping trying to “defend” the president, telling an Oklahoma constituent that Obama’s “intent is not to destroy … It’s to create dependency because it worked so well for him … As an African-American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs.” A black guy raised by a (white) single mother gets into Harvard Law School: In the everyday vocabulary of today’s Republican Party, he’s looking for a handout.
Ronald Reagan wrapped up the ugly racism of earlier Republicans in pretty paper when he claimed, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” and made the case that welfare — which he associated with Democrats — created “dependency” that harmed its recipients. You didn’t have to be angry or racist anymore to oppose welfare programs; you could say you were trying to help their recipients. Reagan also muted the rhetoric that associated welfare with race, at least a little. More than 30 years later, having a black president makes it seem safe, and necessary, to unwrap Reagan’s pretty paper and once again make plain the GOP’s political association between welfare and African-Americans. Make that, having a black Democratic president. This wouldn’t happen to President Herman Cain, would it?
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 6, 2012
Where Oh Where Are Gingrich’s Enemies?
For many members of Congress, it must seem truly strange to observe the current Newt Gingrich boomlet. This is, after all, the same Gingrich who was run out of Washington 13 years ago after his party suffered a rare midterm loss that left Republicans barely hanging on to control of the House. Gingrich not only stepped aside as speaker but resigned his congressional seat. He left the chamber with his tail between his legs and did not exactly endear himself to his fellow members on the way out, calling the other congressional Republicans “hateful” and “cannibals” who blackmailed him out of office during a conference call announcing his departure. With his bombastic style, Gingrich was well set for a life of public speaking and book career far away from any other elected office.
That was the mind-set of the political class when Gingrich entered the presidential field earlier this year (especially after his entire staff fled his campaign over the summer), and yet now Gingrich has—at least for the time being—replaced Mitt Romney as the front-runner for 2012. One would expect those representatives who revolted on Gingrich—many of whom are still in Congress—to rush to the press to divert Republican voters from making the same mistake they made in 1994 when they elevated Gingrich to speaker.
Instead, they’re keeping their thoughts largely to themselves, according to Politico. The group of Republicans who ousted Gingrich in ’98 are hesitant to disparage the new Tea Party favorite, and some have even switched sides and are supporting Gingrich. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey corralled support to replace Gingrich back in the day but demurred from offering comment for Politico‘s article. That’s a strikingly different tone than earlier in the year. “It’s typical of Newt to be whimsical,” Armey told Politico in May. “We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas. Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.” Or take former Representative Bob Livingston, the Louisiana congressman whose challenge to then-Speaker Gingrich incited that harsh resignation conference call. Now Livingston has endorsed Gingrich and is raising money for his former foe.
Not all of Gingrich’s former colleagues have held back. On Sunday, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn—a member of the House during Gingrich’s reign—ripped into the presidential candidate on Fox News. “I’m not inclined to be a supporter of Newt Gingrich,” Coburn said,
“having served under him for four years and experienced personally his leadership…I just found his leadership lacking and I’m not going to go into greater detail in that. And I think if you were poll the gang—the group of people that came in Congress in 1994, in which he did a wonderful job in organizing that, he’s brilliant, he has a lot of positives. But I still—it would be—I will have difficulty supporting him as president of the United States.”
Coburn isn’t alone in that view; if it becomes clear that Gingrich’s surge is not the short-lived bubble of Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, his former colleagues will likely start bringing those attacks out in droves to block his accession back to the top of the party.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, December 6, 2011
Pool Fools: Republicans Denounce Republican Health Care Plan
As pointed out by Jonathan Chait in his recent article in The New Republic on January 12, 2011, “When you combine the GOP’s intense opposition to Obama with its very weak commitment to any alternative policy architecture, you get this kind of wild, opportunistic flip-flopping”. Reference the following enlightening article by Timothy Noah:
Of all the arguments Republicans have been waging against Obamacare as the House of Representatives prepares to vote for its repeal, none is harder to take than their criticism of the federally subsidized high-risk pools the law created to provide immediate relief to the uninsured. In May, the House Republican Conference complained that these high-risk pools would be unfair to people currently enrolled in existing state-run risk pools because the latter group was paying higher premiums. In July, the House Republican Conference complained that implementation of this unfair federal program was being delayed. By January, the House Republican leadership was grousing (in a report titled Obamacare: A Budget-Busting, Job-Killing Health Care Law) that costs for this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed program were higher than expected even as participation in this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed-but-too-costly program was lower than it should be.
Republican health care policies, I noted not quite one year ago (“Pool Party“), typically segregate the healthy majority from the unhealthy minority in order to lower insurance premiums for the healthy. Never mind that that raises insurance premiums sky-high for the unhealthy. High-risk pools are the most efficient way to achieve such segregation and about the least efficient way to pay medical bills here on planet Earth. A health insurance pool consisting entirely of people too sick to qualify for private insurance is like a fire-insurance pool consisting entirely of pyromaniacs. The best that can be said for such groupings is that the hospitalizations (or the fires) probably won’t all happen in the same month. Health insurance high-risk-pool premiums are typically 125 percent to 200 percent above normal premiums, but even so, a government subsidy is typically required to cover costs.
Conservatives claim the problem is not the inherent contradiction in insurance pools consisting entirely of people who need lots and lots of health care, but rather in poor management by the Obama administration. The American Enterprise Institute’s Thomas P. Miller and the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s James Capretta have argued that the administration ought to narrow eligibility; increase the subsidy; and introduce “more effective incentives and tools for both patients and providers to make higher-value health care decisions,” i.e., pressure doctors and hospitals to lower costs and eliminate unnecessary procedures. But the first solution is preposterous in light of weak enrollment (in fairness, Miller and Capretta wrote before that became apparent); the second solution is perhaps necessary but expensive; and the third is a laudable goal that’s much more difficult to achieve with a sick population than with a healthy one. Taken together, these three solutions betray an extreme myopia about the inherent limitations on high-risk pools to begin with.
The poor performance of Obamacare’s high-risk pools aren’t an argument against Obamacare. They’re an argument in favor of it. High-risk pools are a Band-Aid to stanch a hemorrhage. Democrats don’t kid themselves that the Band-Aid will do much to stop the bleeding, which is why they don’t embrace it as a long-term solution. Republicans ought to stop pretending it can be one.
Original Article By: Timothy Noah-Slate, January 11, 2011
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