“It’s A Tax! It’s A Penalty!”: It’s A Stupid Argument Over Semantics
The press assumes people are stupid, thereby making them no less stupid.
Since not much campaign news happens over the July 4th holiday, Mitt Romney took the opportunity to change his campaign’s tune on whether the penalty in the Affordable Care Act for those who can afford health insurance but refuse to get it is a “tax.”
To review, the Supreme Court said the government has the authority under its taxing power to penalize those who refuse to get insurance, leading Republicans to cry, “Tax! Tax! Tax!” with all of their usual policy nuance and rhetorical subtlety. The only problem this poses for Romney is that calling it a tax means that Romney imposed a tax with his health-care plan in Massachusetts, which means admitting that Romney sinned against the tax gods. First his spokesman came out and said that no, it’s really just a penalty, but then Romney came out and said, well, if the Supreme Court said it’s a tax then it’s a tax, but it wasn’t a tax when I did it, because the Supreme Court didn’t call it that.
What does all this arguing over semantics tell us? It tells us that the press and public are both complicit in creating the hurricane of stupidity into which all presidential campaigns devolve.
As for the press, they could treat this as the inconsequential semantic quibble it is. The fact is it doesn’t matter whether you call it a “tax,” a “penalty,” a “freedom fee,” or a “Lenin levy.” It’s the same thing. And for the record, according to the Urban Institute, only 2 percent of Americans will be subject to the tax/penalty. And the whole idea is that most of them will be motivated by the tax/penalty to get health insurance, so the whole idea of the tax/penalty is that almost no one will end up paying it.
But the press has treated the question of what Mitt Romney will call the fee as though it matters. Because of some weird nostalgia, I get the dead-tree editions of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, and when I went outside into the 150-degree heat to get my papers this morning (note to self: get time machine, go back and convince George Washington to put the nation’s capital in someplace cold and rainy like Seattle), I found that both front pages had stories about this virtually meaningless issue.
That’s partly because it’s a slow news day, but also because the press knows just how dumb the electorate is. If all voters were at least reasonably informed about things, stuff like this would matter far less. No one who actually knows even the first thing about the Affordable Care Act could possibly have their opinion altered by what we decide to call the penalty for not carrying insurance. No one who thinks it’s a necessary measure will say, “Gee, now that people are calling it a ‘tax,’ that really changes how I think about it.” And if you didn’t like it before, you won’t like it any more or less if we put a different name on it.
But the press operates on the unspoken assumption that meaningful numbers of people actually will react that way. In other words, they assume the public is stupid, and that assumption leads them to make decisions that do nothing to make the public any less stupid. At the same time, if the public knew more about the actual consequences of the election, reporters would certainly pick up on it and alter their coverage accordingly. But since only 55 percent of the public even knows what the result of the most important Supreme Court decision on a policy issue in decades even was, reporters will stick to assuming the public is clueless, and they’ll largely be right.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 5, 2012
“A Potential Warning Sign”: Our National Political Science Experiment
Can Mitt Romney win the election without actually saying anything?
MSNBC’s First Read has an excellent take on the Romney campaign’s flexibility, or lack thereof:
If there is a constant criticism about Mitt Romney and his campaign from both the left and right, it’s that they’re not nimble – especially when it comes to dealing with issues they’d prefer to ignore. […]
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Much of a president’s job is crisis management, and the only way to succeed is being nimble. That Team Romney seems to struggle with this aspect of the job is a potential warning sign for a challenger against an incumbent president.
What compounds the problem is the fact that Romney is also evasive on those issues he wants to talk about. Despite his monomaniacal focus on economic growth, Romney has been reluctant to give details on what he would actually do to improve the short-term economic situation. In fact, when pressed for details, he gives a surprisingly candid answer on why he refuses to offer any meat to the public:
“The media kept saying to Chris, ‘Come on, give us the details, give us the details,’’’ Romney has said about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial race. ‘’We want to hang you with them.’”
Put another way, Romney won’t give you details because he doesn’t want to deal with the political fallout, as if there’s something illegitimate about critiquing a politician for their policy proposals.
How you think this plays out depends, in large part, on what you think determines elections. If you see the economy as the most crucial variable, then Romney will not suffer from his refusal to offer details. By virtue of being not-Obama, he’ll win disaffected voters and succeed Obama as president of the United States. But, if you give weight to campaigns, then–as First Read points out–Romney’s behavior is a real liability. There might be a critical mass of voters who want a different direction, but aren’t willing to make a blind leap for Romney. To win those voters, he’ll need to offer specifics.
This is a long way of saying that we’re basically in the midst of a large-scale political science experiment. Romney’s campaign will answer a crucial question—with a bad economy in the background, does a challenger have to offer anything to win election?
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, June 27, 2012
“A Service To The Nation”: Obama Has The Right And Duty To Highlight Romney’s Record
Has the Obama Campaign Gone Too Negative?
Your question presumes “negative campaigns” are a problem. Like everything else they can go too far, but negative campaigning began with the very first elections. In ancient Rome, Cicero railed against his opponents for incest with a sister, debauchery with actors, thuggery with gladiators, not to mention child molestation with boys so young they were “almost in their parents’ laps.” In our first presidential election, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents argued that if he were elected, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced…” In our more genteel times, such attacks would be far out of bounds.
Negative campaigning happens because it works. It works in part because negative information is useful. We naturally look for the negative. When an employer rummages through a pile of resumes, she is looking for the easy disqualification, the reason to discard a few candidates. Unlike their more pleasant, positive counterparts, negative ads tend to include at least one verifiable fact. While positive ads often feature a candidate, jacket slung over a shoulder, mouthing platitudes in the company of an adoring family, negative ads describe votes cast, positions taken, failed efforts, and values forsaken.
Our brains are wired to weigh this kind of information heavily. Decades of research in psychology demonstrates that negative information is processed more quickly and more deeply than positive information, providing a biological basis for negative campaigns. They conform to human nature.
So-called negative campaigning isn’t all bad—and sometimes it’s both fair and necessary. The natural state of an election involving an incumbent president is to be a referendum on that incumbent—an up or down vote on the individual occupying the Oval Office. That’s not only unfair to the president, its unhealthy for the country. Elections actually confront us with choices, choices between two different individuals with different histories, different philosophies, different values, and different platforms. Voters should think of the campaign as a choice.
Bringing former Gov. Mitt Romney’s faults to the fore helps the American people see this election as the choice it is. That’s both good for the president and good for the country. As long as the blows aren’t below the belt and focus on what former Governor Romney has done, what he believes, and what he will do, there is nothing at all untoward about the tack taken by the president’s campaign. In fact, it’s a service to the nation.
“This Republican Economy”: A Policy Of Dreams, A Gigantic Con Game
What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.
So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.
For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.
What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War.
How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high.
Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. In F.D.R.’s case, however, this was an unforced error, since he had a solidly Democratic Congress. In President Obama’s case, much though not all of the responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House.
That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
As I said, for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy.
As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that although the economy’s performance has been disappointing, to say the least, none of the disasters Republicans predicted have come to pass. Remember all those assertions that budget deficits would lead to soaring interest rates? Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. And remember those dire warnings about inflation and the “debasement” of the dollar? Well, inflation remains low, and the dollar has been stronger than it was in the Bush years.
Put it this way: Republicans have been warning that we were about to turn into Greece because President Obama was doing too much to boost the economy; Keynesian economists like myself warned that we were, on the contrary, at risk of turning into Japan because he was doing too little. And Japanification it is, except with a level of misery the Japanese never had to endure.
So why don’t voters know any of this?
Part of the answer is that far too much economic reporting is still of the he-said, she-said variety, with dueling quotes from hired guns on either side. But it’s also true that the Obama team has consistently failed to highlight Republican obstruction, perhaps out of a fear of seeming weak. Instead, the president’s advisers keep turning to happy talk, seizing on a few months’ good economic news as proof that their policies are working — and then ending up looking foolish when the numbers turn down again. Remarkably, they’ve made this mistake three times in a row: in 2010, 2011 and now once again.
At this point, however, Mr. Obama and his political team don’t seem to have much choice. They can point with pride to some big economic achievements, above all the successful rescue of the auto industry, which is responsible for a large part of whatever job growth we are managing to get. But they’re not going to be able to sell a narrative of overall economic success. Their best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be.
For that, in the end, is the best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work.
By: Paul Krugman, Op Ed-Columnist, The New York Times, June 3, 2012
“A Conservative Neurosis”: The Right’s Fixation With “Vetting” President Obama
“The Vetting” represents a peculiar species of conservative neurosis, which I discussed last week in the context of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many conservatives are convinced that somewhere hidden in Obama’s past is a magical key which will unmask him to American voters as the villain which heretofore only the fringe right has seen him to be.
This theory, while ostensibly an attack on the media for failing to do its civic duty is actually pretty insulting toward U.S. voters. Despite what conservatives seem to think, there hasn’t been a media conspiracy to avoid talking about Jeremiah Wright. I ran a Nexis-Lexis search for the phrase “Obama and Jeremiah Wright,” for both the period before the 2008 election and for all available dates. In each case, it returned more than 3,000 results—the limit at which Nexis requires you to cut down your search. Similarly I ran a Google News search for “Obama and Jeremiah Wright” and it returned 17,600 results, including 9,400 from before November 4, 2008. There was plenty of information available about Obama and Wright, the public just didn’t think it was all that important. That’s not a failing of the media or even of the public—it’s a failing of the unhinged right.
And as Friedersdorf persuasively argues, it’s an obsession that is holding back the right.
For Breitbart.com, the decision to commit substantial editorial resources to the president’s past had an immediate opportunity cost: there’d be fewer pieces on his first term in office and less opportunity to present arguments about why conservative policies would better serve the country. The decision seemed strange to me. Conservative media was around during the 2008 election. Was there really relevant information that they’d failed to uncover at the time? And while President Obama surprised civil libertarians with his governing choices, weren’t the things conservatives hated about him—the health-care bill, the Keynesian stimulus, the “green jobs” program—basically exactly what you’d expect from the campaign he ran, or from any liberal Democrat?
He then runs through the “The Vetting” series citing example after weak example of what Breitbart.com has, umm, found. I won’t recount the whole thing here—the piece is worth a full read—except to note that as he points out much of what they deduce about Obama is hardly secret or surprising. One example: “Charles C. Johnson broke the news that as a community organizer, President Obama worked with leftist Catholics to undermine conservative Catholics. This might’ve prepared us for Obama’s position on the Catholic Church and birth control … except his position itself was already clear!”
What’s the point after four years of Obama governing of trying to deduce from his distant past how he would govern? It’s a natural extension of this neurosis: If you’re convinced that the president is a secretive figure with a hidden past who must be unmasked before a duped public, it then becomes logical to think that he must be readying really, really, really sinister plans for his second term when he will no longer have to worry about facing voters.
And no doubt four years from now we’ll be treated to a raft of stories from the far right regions of the blogosphere frantically warning of how Obama’s hidden past foretells the ominous, secretive plans he has for his presidential library.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2012
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