From Newsweek -- July 29, 2012:
Mitt Romney's Wimp Factor
By Michael Tomasky
Dodging reporters, fearing his base, hiding his taxes—is Mitt Romney just too insecure to be president? In Newsweek, Michael Tomasky surveys a history of presidential manliness and asks just where Mitt would fit amid the studly swagger of Dubya and Reagan.
It should be the easiest thing in the world for a presidential nominee: a trip to England. The mother country, the shared tongue, our firmest ally. And it should have been easiest of all last week, happening as it did on the eve of the Olympics. Just praise everything you see. Limn London as one of the world’s great cities, invoke the spirit of the British people that lives on from the glorious days of the blitz. Praise the bangers and mash and the pasties if you have to. Nothing to it.
And yet, Mitt Romney managed to alienate just about every living Briton. He didn’t merely criticize the organizers or bureaucrats—he questioned the people of Britain themselves: “Do [the people] come together and celebrate the Olympic moment?” He wasn’t sure. The Sun even went so far as to dub him “Mitt the Twit.”
It was an astonishing faux pas—one of many packed into his brief visit. And it makes one wonder: if elected, Romney is going to have to work hand-in-glove with Prime Minister David Cameron and other world leaders on the ongoing global financial crisis and other issues. What unintended offenses are going to tumble out of his mouth then, when he’s representing our nation on the world stage?
The episode highlights what’s really wrong with Romney. He’s kind of lame, and he’s really ... annoying. He keeps saying these ... things, these incredibly off-key things. Then he apologizes immediately—with all the sincerity of a hostage. Or maybe he doesn’t: sometimes he whines about the subsequent attacks on him. But the one thing he never does? Man up, double down, take his lumps.
In 1987, this magazine created a famous hubbub by labeling George H.W. Bush a “wimp” on its cover. “The Wimp Factor.” Huge stir. And not entirely fair—the guy had been an aviator in the war, the big war, the good war, and he was even shot down out over the Pacific, cockpit drenched in smoke and fumes, at an age (20) when in most states he couldn’t even legally drink a beer. In hindsight, Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned ... French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?
Another point of comparison with Bush Sr. is instructive. Newsweek identified Bush’s wimp problem as being laced into his adherence to an old, upper-class, WASP civic code: the idea that one does not put oneself inordinately forward. At his boarding school, students literally received grades in a category titled “Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention.” Somehow, in 1987, this magazine decided that high marks in that realm constituted a demerit. But a quarter century, one global financial meltdown, several concentrations of wealth, and many magnitudes of culture-coarsening later, that sounds like a real plus. He was magnanimous, and his magnanimity was grounded in a code of honor.
Romney was raised in that same code—his father was the epitome of the civic-minded millionaire (except, of course, the Romneys were not WASPs). But as Mitt was making his fortune, those old values were being ground to dust by new Gordon Gekko values. The clash between those competing value systems exists inside him. There’s some of the old—he gives away plenty of money and so on. But the new values surface often enough—his fondness for firing people, the way he made fun of NASCAR fans’ ponchos, his reminders to us that his friends are the people who own the teams, and now his putdown of an entire nation, which happens to be our closest ally—to suggest that they won the argument.
A good-looking guy doesn’t have to walk around saying, “Hey, look at me!” He knows everyone’s looking. And a rich guy doesn’t have to remind us he’s rich. When he does, something’s off. It looks insecure.
Romney is the genuine article: a true wimp. Oh, there are some ways in which he’s not—a wimp lets himself get kicked around, and Romney doesn’t exactly do that. He sure didn’t during the primaries, when he strafed Rick Perry and carpet-bombed Rick Santorum (but note that they were both weaker than he).
In some respects, he’s more weenie than wimp—socially inept; at times awkwardy ingratiating, at other times mocking those “below” him, but almost always getting the situation a little wrong, and never in a sympathetic way. The evidence resonates across too many years to deny. What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May? The behavior extends, through more sedate means, into adulthood. The Salt Lake Olympics remains his greatest triumph, for which he wins deserved praise. But to many of those in the know, Romney placed a heavy asterisk next to his name by attacking the men he replaced on the Olympic Committee, smearing them in his book, even after a court threw out all the corruption charges against them.
And what kind of presidential candidate whines about a few attacks and demands an apology when the going starts to get rough? And tries to sound tough by accusing the president who killed the world’s most-wanted villain of appeasement? That’s what they call overcompensation, and it’s a dead giveaway; it’s the “tell.” This guy is nervous—terrified—about looking weak. And ironically, being terrified of looking weak makes him look weaker still.
Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard political philosopher, is a godhead to conservatives. He wrote a book while Bush was president called Manliness. It was a self-parodic volume, but conservatives loved it. In 2006 an interviewer asked Mansfield his definition of manliness, and he said: “confidence in a situation of risk.”
By this definition, the conservative definition, Romney is a total bust. He’s the most risk-averse major politician to come along in ages. He accepted the job at Bain Capital only after wringing out of Bill Bain a promise that, if the venture failed, Mitt would be welcomed back to Bain & Co.—at his old levels of compensation and seniority—and that the press and public would be fed some happy talk about how it had all gone as intended. And why didn’t he leave Bain in 1999 to go run the Olympics, as he always said he had, but instead take his now-famous “leave of absence”? To have the option of coming back; to minimize the risk. Even his flip-flopping, his taking of positions all over the map, is a form of risk aversion, being all things to all people, able to placate any audience, never stuck out on a limb unable to satisfy.
There’s another conservative yardstick on which Romney comes up short: he’s too smart, as in clever or book-smart, to be a real Republican candidate. All those stories about how intensely data-driven he was at Bain, or as governor? Weird. Liberals, men of caution and contemplation, are obsessed with data. Conservative men are supposed to be men of action—they have hunches and play them. In this one sense Romney is just like a Massachusetts liberal. When it’s said that conservatives still don’t trust the guy, it’s not just his past moderate record they distrust, but also this sense of Romney as approaching issues intellectually instead of instinctively, producing the lurking unease that if he got into that Oval Office, Romney might one day look at the evidence and decide that, by Jiminy Cricket, global warming does exist!
Which ties directly to his biggest wimp problem. He still, after five years and two presidential campaigns, has yet to take one real stand on any issue; has yet to adopt one position that troubles his party’s hard right. At least Obama praised Ronald Reagan. And he meant it. Romney has tried to praise Bill Clinton, but it was so obviously by way of denouncing Obama that it came off sounding hollow and too clever by half.
The catalog of Romney flip-flops is lengthy and by now famous: abortion rights; support for Planned Parenthood, to which he and his wife once wrote checks, now in his gun sights; Grover Norquist’s “no tax increases” pledge, which he admirably refused to sign as a gubernatorial candidate but since 2007 has taken up with gusto; on immigration, where he once supported a path to citizenship; on guns (he supported the Brady Bill in the 1990s); on “don’t ask, don’t tell”; and, most famously of all, on health care.
These are conventionally explained by the obvious political dichotomy: the moderate positions were adopted when he was seeking votes in Massachusetts, the conservative ones when he went national. That’s true as far as it goes.
But there’s more going on in this case. All politicians undergo a tuck here and a trim there. Comparatively few turn outright somersaults on big issues, let alone half a dozen or more of them. What gives? Most pols in Romney’s position would think: OK, I’ve got to change some stances, but I’d better keep one or two, just to show I stand for something, and accept the consequences. But not Romney.
Politicians change positions for three main reasons: financial ambition, political ruthlessness, and political cowardice. Romney already has the big money, so that’s out. Ruthless? Not really—a ruthless change of position is one designed to please one group of people but equally to piss off another group. Romney’s flip-flops are solely about making a group of highly suspicious voters like him. That, folks, is door No. 3.
Compounding matters, when pressed to the slightest degree about his inconsistencies, he can get nasty and whiny. No one talks anymore about his encounter with Bret Baier of Fox News last December, but it was a Moment. When Baier had the nerve to challenge him on his health-care and immigration views, Romney complained—told Baier his questions were “uncalled for!” Of course it was Fox, which is supposed to be his on-air public-relations firm, so Romney was shocked. But even so, you don’t say it. A politician complaining about a journalist just doing his job is ... weenie-ish.
In a similar vein, it was breathtaking, and a meaningful window into his thinking, that he thought denouncing “Obamacare” to the NAACP constituted courage. That was the opposite of courage—an easy shot aimed at people who aren’t voting for him anyway. Going to the Southern Baptist Convention and telling them they’re all wet about Mormonism? Now that would be courage. Can anyone picture Romney doing that in a million years? The Mormon God will come down from Kolob before that happens.
This is the first presidential campaign of the post-World War II era in which neither candidate is a veteran. With no one having that card to play, the candidates have to nudge the testosterone meter through other means.
Obama is not your stereotypical gunslinger, that’s for sure. He came into office as the liberal beau ideal. His opposition to the Iraq War was his great calling card, along with his race. But now look: he’s knocking off terrorists at a pace that Cheney would envy. Despite what conservatives believe—that liberals are silent about this because it’s a Democratic president doing it—he takes a lot of whacks in the liberal press over this. But his mind is made up. For better or worse, he’s not going to be a Jimmy Carter or a Mike Dukakis under any circumstances he can help.
In the Osama bin Laden raid, he made the toughest high-pressure decision a president has made since the Cuban missile crisis. Talk about risk! Harvey Mansfield must have swooned while watching that gripping 60 Minutes segment when Obama and others discussed how it all went down.
What a crazy, and crazily unseeable, irony that would be, if Barack Obama ended up being the guy who turned the Democrats into a tough-guy party again. They’ve been trying for years, since the post-Vietnam 1970s when these lines began to harden. Clinton was getting there in his second term with the Kosovo business and a wave of foreign-policy successes, but Monica got in the way. Even after that, Clinton came within a few hours of getting bin Laden in August 1998, although at that point, most Americans would have asked, “Who?”
Then came 9/11, and we know all that history. Bush on the pile of rubble with the megaphone—giving him enough tough-guy momentum to coast all the way through the 2004 election. But by 2008, the macho bank had been seriously depleted—starting and not being able to finish two wars will have that effect.
But even so, the Democrats remained totally emasculated. Didn’t know what to do. The two other leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, spent the pre-2008 years doing everything they could to shore up their macho cred. But it took the most unlikely one of them—antiwar, cerebral, urban, a community organizer; someone who, when he launched his quest for the presidency, may not even have known the difference between a brigade and a battalion—to bring the party back to the Truman-Acheson roots the Republicans tried so hard during the Bush years to replant in their own soil.
Romney will go at Obama hard until the election on Pentagon cuts and security leaks and Obama’s alleged apologies for America. Here and there he’ll score a point. But here, too, he’s just trying too hard. You watch something like his recent VFW speech, and you see that he so desperately wants people to see him and think: “He’s like Reagan.” Please. You would no more cast Romney as Reagan than you would Pee-wee Herman as James Bond.
Republicans and conservatives seem to know all this: many of them wanted New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to jump in. Now, there’s a Republican man! Bellicose, sharp-tongued, a gleeful crusher of liberal pieties. Even his girth seems somehow manly. (Maybe it’s the way he throws it around.) He’s a smart choice to keynote the party’s convention—he’ll supply the tough-guy shtick the nominee can’t.
Every once in a while, a George Will or Bill Kristol will fret in public that Romney just doesn’t have the sauce. Donors and GOP honchos, while giving him their full backing because they despise Obama, are well aware that Romney was just the least bad of the party’s available candidates—not the sort of man Republicans prefer carrying their standard into battle, and one whose defects, should he lose, could injure the party long into the future, especially on what used to be the GOP’s “natural” foreign-policy advantage.
But if Romney is elected? Be nervous. A Republican president sure of his manhood had nothing to prove. Reagan was happy with a jolly little shoot-up in Grenada, and eventually he settled down to the serious work of arms control, consummating historic treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev. But a weenie Republican—look out. He has something to prove, needs to reassert that “natural” advantage. That spells trouble more often than not.
Still, there’s a campaign to get through first. At some point, an unexpected event more serious than the Olympics—a scandal, a smear—will put Romney under the interrogation lamp, and he’ll need to rise to the occasion. We’ll see then if he has it in him. So far, he wants to sneak into the White House through a side door, without having to do any of the difficult and controversial things candidates have to do. Voters want candidates who are harshly tested and emerge from those tests stronger. Romney is desperate above all else to dodge them—and when they have come, he’s failed.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Mitt The Twit Has Become the Clueless Foot-In-Mouth Ugly American
From The Daily Beast -- July 31, 2012:
The Ugly American: Mitt Romney’s Disastrous Overseas Excursion
By Robert Shrum
Though his advisors keep putting Romney is a message box, he keeps bursting out with gaffes, writes Robert Shrum.
In Jerusalem, they tried to strap Mitt tightly to the roof of his message box.
A fundraiser was closed to the press, presumably to facilitate the candidate’s crass pandering, and perhaps to fend off a photo op with the Jabba the Hut of the campaign wars, casino plutocrat and Super Pac-Man Sheldon Adelson. Finally, the Romney strategists allowed a few reporters to attend, less they appear fearful that their candidate might blurt out another on-the-record political solecism.
A chastened Romney mostly stayed on course by bloviating ritual fealty of Israeli security, and denouncing “containment” of Iran as a “delusion.” (Of course, Barack Obama hasn’t ruled out force either, but that doesn’t matter to Romney.) The Republican nominee-to-be added the pretty standard, wholly pre-presidential endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He also skirted but didn’t transgress the off-limits line against criticizing American foreign policy abroad; his coded jibes at the president, never mentioned by name, were just veiled enough.
Romney was programmed to be gaffe-free as he made a political pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of the holy grail of Jewish votes back home. The programming was almost successful-- and it was certainly a direct result of his previous stop on a not-so-grand journey. In Israel, Mitt was supposed to act like a mutt brought to heel after he earned the worst welcome in London since King Richard II was deposed following an ill-timed and inconclusive invasion of Ireland. Romney was in the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympiad, sitting in a relative and blessed anonymity, a forced smile on his face. It had been a painful few days as he auditioned on the world stage for the most powerful job in the world.
Before he left for London, Romney’s campaign had decided that he shouldn’t be filmed watching his wife’s well-heeled dancing horse compete in the Dressage competition. The best laid plans: Instead it was Mitt himself who came up lame, hobbled and lacerated by his own tripping tongue.
How could any politician with any modicum of sagacity—let alone someone who’s one election away from the Oval Office—venture abroad and question whether his host country was “ready” for the Olympics? Romney came across as simultaneously a know-nothing and a smug know-it-all—at least about the Olympic Games, which he seems to think he owns and which he has regularly treated like one of those enterprises taken over by Bain ever since he took over the 2002 Winter Games.
Romney went overseas to show he was qualified to be president—but seldom if ever has any such an effort made someone look so foolish so fast, with so much blowback coming from across the political spectrum.
He also seemed not to know the name of Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who could be prime minister relatively soon into the next presidential term. At the press conference when the two men met, Romney referred to Miliband as “Mr. Leader”—a title that doesn’t exist in Britain but a convenient refuge if you can’t remember who it is you’re standing next to. The GOP hopeful also didn’t know that he wasn’t supposed to volunteer—no one is—that he had just been briefed by the chief of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Such a thing, as they say in London, just isn’t done.
For his Olympic-level faux pas, his fellow conservatives across the pond peeped rebuke and ridicule on Romney. The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, archly observed that there was a difference between holding the Games in one of the world’s “busiest, most active, bustling cities and the easier” job of holding them out “in the middle of nowhere”—a pointed put-down of Mitt’s role in Salt Lake City a decade of winters ago. London Mayor Boris Johnson poked fun at a “guy named Mitt who wants to know whether we’re ready” and ignited a crowd of 60,00 in Hyde Park to chant: “Yes, we are”—for Romney, a discomforting echo of the 2008 Obama mantra.
While Rupert Murdoch’s Sun memorably labeled Romney “Mitt the Twit,” it wasn’t just the British press and politicians who scorned his bumbling performance. Karl Rove, who’s assembling hundreds of millions of dollars to elect him president—and who perhaps should go from being “Bush’s brain” to being Romney’s—ruefully said “you have to shake your head” about the way the candidate just stepped into it. The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was blunter: The episode was “unbelievable...beyond human understanding...It’s like a guy in the hundred meter dash. All he has to do is finish, he doesn’t have to win. And instead he tackles the guy in the next lane and gets disqualified.”
Disqualified is the right word because Romney went overseas precisely to show he was qualified to be president. Seldom if ever has any such an effort made someone look so foolish so fast, with so much blowback coming from across the political spectrum.
Indeed this story of a major figure lacking even minimal sense was so delicious—a case of man bites himself—that you could be tempted to suspect it was a one-off, a sideshow without lasting significance. That was exactly how the Romney campaign thought to spin it. American voters don’t care what foreigners think was the jingoistic response of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential Romney running mate. But they do care whether an American president can think on his feet—or thinks before he speaks.
And Mitt’s London follies were more than a case of political life imitating Saturday Night Live. What he revealed was both his shallowness in foreign policy and the more pervasive flaw of a candidate who reflexively gets things wrong when presented with the unexpected— or sometimes, even on something that should have been entirely anticipated and vetted.
A gaffe is one thing, but a passage in a book is another. In terms of Romney’s international comprehension and competence, consider these words in his campaign tome No Apology: “England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.” England? What about Scotland and Wales—which is why the Island nation is called Great Britain. Small roads? Has he ever heard of the motorways—yes, freeways—that stretch the length and breadth of the country outside London? Small houses? This is a childish cliché. And as for exports: How about aerospace, pharmaceuticals, financial services, the creative industries and high tech? (Sir Tim Berners Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.)
How could anyone with presidential ambitions write what Romney did, or let it be ghost written for him? One explanation is that he’s clueless, the other is that he doesn’t care. Either, as Krauthammer might put it, is disqualifying. And Mitt should be relieved that No Apology apparently has no readers in Britain.
In fact, that book like his overseas junket, typifies the Romney foreign policy. It largely consists of content-less slogans and a disconnected set of opportunistic and false attacks on the President, coupled with an intention to reinstate the Bush neo-conmen who cratered America’s standing in the world as surely as their domestic counterparts collapsed the American economy. Beyond that there is emptiness—and repeated proof that Romney is without basic knowledge and out of his depth.
Thus one of his advisors recently warned that we need to do more to defend “Czechoslovakia” from the “Soviet Union.” Neither country still exists. Romney himself won’t say himself how long he would stay in Afghanistan, and on the issue of a possible conflict with Iran he said in a Republican primary debate: “You sit down with your attorneys and [they?] tell you what you have to do.” He opposed going into Pakistan to track down terrorists and observed that finding Osama bin Laden wasn’t “worth moving heaven and earth.” After the bin Laden raid—inside Pakistan—he gave credit to the Navy Seals and begrudged the President who had sent them to kill or capture the mastermind of 9-11.
The list goes on and on. Jake Tapper of ABC News counted a constantly shifting array of Romney positions on U.S. involvement in Libya: Do it sooner; I’m not saying anything; Obama’s doing too much; it’s great Gadhafi’s gone. At one point in his confused peregrinations, Mitt ran through a hallway and jumped on an escalator to duck reporters’ questions.
In foreign policy, Romney can look like Palin in a business suit with a cheat sheet of buzzwords, but hardly any substance at all. She didn’t know where foreign countries were; he doesn’t know what to say when he gets there. And while he may read the briefing books, he evidences none of the judgment, restraint, and the taut and tempered boldness required of a president at junctures of maximum danger.
That matters profoundly.
Mitt’s golden gaffes in London manifest not only his incapacity abroad, but his lack of sound instinct—of the qualities that are the bedrock of the hardest presidential decisions. Michael Kingsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say." And Romney, in his gaffes over the past week and all through his long years of campaigning, has exposed his true self as superficial, cynical—unprepared to respond wisely and well to tests to political leadership. If he fumbled to predictable questions in London, imagine how he would do in the sudden perilous challenges of the presidency.
He has traveled overseas and played the part of “The Ugly American.” In the novel of that title, the real ugly American was a hero, an unhandsome engineer who actually bothered to understand the Asian nation he was trying to help as it faced a Communist insurgency. But the phrase has come to stand for something else described in the novel—a typology of arrogance and obliviousness that fits Mitt the malaprop: he’s a tightly wound, but conspicuously out-of-touch—a caricature of those Americans the book describes who “go to a foreign country...[and] are loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they’re frightened and defensive; or maybe they’re not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.”
Whatever the cause, there is reason to think that Romney is not ready on day one—or day three hundred—for the demand of leading America in a complicated and dangerous world. There’s more than a chance that, with his gifts of misjudgment, he would be dangerous in the White House.
One thing is sure: Romney is dangerous to his own campaign. His handlers will do everything they can to keep him strapped to that message box until the election. They doubtlessly wish they had gone to Ohio or Florida instead of the land of small roads and small houses. But if he had stayed home, who knows what might have emerged from the mouth of this unnatural, animatronic politician if he had stumbled off script? Remember “I like being able to fire people”?
You see, Mitt can’t help himself—even when he’s supposed to be pre-canned. Go back to that fundraising dinner with Sheldon Adelson and company; oops, I mean breakfast. Romney had scheduled the dinner for Tisha B’AB, a Holy Day when observant Jews fast for 25 hours. At the rescheduled breakfast the morning, he casually let slip an ethnic stereotype. “Jewish culture,” he said, is responsible for Israel’s prosperity and the disparity between the Israeli and Palestinian economies. That is both inaccurate and insensitive. It’s a good thing Romney left the country right afterwards—or he might have said “some of his best friends are...”
In Poland, the Romney team made it three-for-three in botched opportunities overseas when spokesman Rick Gorka—firing back at reporters peppering the candidate with questions about his press-shyness—was caught on camera shouting at reporters: “kiss my ass.” (He later apologized.)
But just wait. When Romney returns from baiting the Russian (not Soviet) bear during his final stop in Poland, he’ll will have a little over 90 days of campaigning left—and he will trip over his tongue again and again.
He’s the prince of verbal pratfalls, overseas and at home. And in a sense, that’s a good thing because the more you see and hear him in this presidential campaign, the more you know he’s just not up to the job.
The Ugly American: Mitt Romney’s Disastrous Overseas Excursion
By Robert Shrum
Though his advisors keep putting Romney is a message box, he keeps bursting out with gaffes, writes Robert Shrum.
In Jerusalem, they tried to strap Mitt tightly to the roof of his message box.
A fundraiser was closed to the press, presumably to facilitate the candidate’s crass pandering, and perhaps to fend off a photo op with the Jabba the Hut of the campaign wars, casino plutocrat and Super Pac-Man Sheldon Adelson. Finally, the Romney strategists allowed a few reporters to attend, less they appear fearful that their candidate might blurt out another on-the-record political solecism.
A chastened Romney mostly stayed on course by bloviating ritual fealty of Israeli security, and denouncing “containment” of Iran as a “delusion.” (Of course, Barack Obama hasn’t ruled out force either, but that doesn’t matter to Romney.) The Republican nominee-to-be added the pretty standard, wholly pre-presidential endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He also skirted but didn’t transgress the off-limits line against criticizing American foreign policy abroad; his coded jibes at the president, never mentioned by name, were just veiled enough.
Romney was programmed to be gaffe-free as he made a political pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of the holy grail of Jewish votes back home. The programming was almost successful-- and it was certainly a direct result of his previous stop on a not-so-grand journey. In Israel, Mitt was supposed to act like a mutt brought to heel after he earned the worst welcome in London since King Richard II was deposed following an ill-timed and inconclusive invasion of Ireland. Romney was in the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympiad, sitting in a relative and blessed anonymity, a forced smile on his face. It had been a painful few days as he auditioned on the world stage for the most powerful job in the world.
Before he left for London, Romney’s campaign had decided that he shouldn’t be filmed watching his wife’s well-heeled dancing horse compete in the Dressage competition. The best laid plans: Instead it was Mitt himself who came up lame, hobbled and lacerated by his own tripping tongue.
How could any politician with any modicum of sagacity—let alone someone who’s one election away from the Oval Office—venture abroad and question whether his host country was “ready” for the Olympics? Romney came across as simultaneously a know-nothing and a smug know-it-all—at least about the Olympic Games, which he seems to think he owns and which he has regularly treated like one of those enterprises taken over by Bain ever since he took over the 2002 Winter Games.
Romney went overseas to show he was qualified to be president—but seldom if ever has any such an effort made someone look so foolish so fast, with so much blowback coming from across the political spectrum.
He also seemed not to know the name of Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who could be prime minister relatively soon into the next presidential term. At the press conference when the two men met, Romney referred to Miliband as “Mr. Leader”—a title that doesn’t exist in Britain but a convenient refuge if you can’t remember who it is you’re standing next to. The GOP hopeful also didn’t know that he wasn’t supposed to volunteer—no one is—that he had just been briefed by the chief of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Such a thing, as they say in London, just isn’t done.
For his Olympic-level faux pas, his fellow conservatives across the pond peeped rebuke and ridicule on Romney. The current Prime Minister, David Cameron, archly observed that there was a difference between holding the Games in one of the world’s “busiest, most active, bustling cities and the easier” job of holding them out “in the middle of nowhere”—a pointed put-down of Mitt’s role in Salt Lake City a decade of winters ago. London Mayor Boris Johnson poked fun at a “guy named Mitt who wants to know whether we’re ready” and ignited a crowd of 60,00 in Hyde Park to chant: “Yes, we are”—for Romney, a discomforting echo of the 2008 Obama mantra.
While Rupert Murdoch’s Sun memorably labeled Romney “Mitt the Twit,” it wasn’t just the British press and politicians who scorned his bumbling performance. Karl Rove, who’s assembling hundreds of millions of dollars to elect him president—and who perhaps should go from being “Bush’s brain” to being Romney’s—ruefully said “you have to shake your head” about the way the candidate just stepped into it. The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was blunter: The episode was “unbelievable...beyond human understanding...It’s like a guy in the hundred meter dash. All he has to do is finish, he doesn’t have to win. And instead he tackles the guy in the next lane and gets disqualified.”
Disqualified is the right word because Romney went overseas precisely to show he was qualified to be president. Seldom if ever has any such an effort made someone look so foolish so fast, with so much blowback coming from across the political spectrum.
Indeed this story of a major figure lacking even minimal sense was so delicious—a case of man bites himself—that you could be tempted to suspect it was a one-off, a sideshow without lasting significance. That was exactly how the Romney campaign thought to spin it. American voters don’t care what foreigners think was the jingoistic response of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a potential Romney running mate. But they do care whether an American president can think on his feet—or thinks before he speaks.
And Mitt’s London follies were more than a case of political life imitating Saturday Night Live. What he revealed was both his shallowness in foreign policy and the more pervasive flaw of a candidate who reflexively gets things wrong when presented with the unexpected— or sometimes, even on something that should have been entirely anticipated and vetted.
A gaffe is one thing, but a passage in a book is another. In terms of Romney’s international comprehension and competence, consider these words in his campaign tome No Apology: “England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.” England? What about Scotland and Wales—which is why the Island nation is called Great Britain. Small roads? Has he ever heard of the motorways—yes, freeways—that stretch the length and breadth of the country outside London? Small houses? This is a childish cliché. And as for exports: How about aerospace, pharmaceuticals, financial services, the creative industries and high tech? (Sir Tim Berners Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.)
How could anyone with presidential ambitions write what Romney did, or let it be ghost written for him? One explanation is that he’s clueless, the other is that he doesn’t care. Either, as Krauthammer might put it, is disqualifying. And Mitt should be relieved that No Apology apparently has no readers in Britain.
In fact, that book like his overseas junket, typifies the Romney foreign policy. It largely consists of content-less slogans and a disconnected set of opportunistic and false attacks on the President, coupled with an intention to reinstate the Bush neo-conmen who cratered America’s standing in the world as surely as their domestic counterparts collapsed the American economy. Beyond that there is emptiness—and repeated proof that Romney is without basic knowledge and out of his depth.
Thus one of his advisors recently warned that we need to do more to defend “Czechoslovakia” from the “Soviet Union.” Neither country still exists. Romney himself won’t say himself how long he would stay in Afghanistan, and on the issue of a possible conflict with Iran he said in a Republican primary debate: “You sit down with your attorneys and [they?] tell you what you have to do.” He opposed going into Pakistan to track down terrorists and observed that finding Osama bin Laden wasn’t “worth moving heaven and earth.” After the bin Laden raid—inside Pakistan—he gave credit to the Navy Seals and begrudged the President who had sent them to kill or capture the mastermind of 9-11.
The list goes on and on. Jake Tapper of ABC News counted a constantly shifting array of Romney positions on U.S. involvement in Libya: Do it sooner; I’m not saying anything; Obama’s doing too much; it’s great Gadhafi’s gone. At one point in his confused peregrinations, Mitt ran through a hallway and jumped on an escalator to duck reporters’ questions.
In foreign policy, Romney can look like Palin in a business suit with a cheat sheet of buzzwords, but hardly any substance at all. She didn’t know where foreign countries were; he doesn’t know what to say when he gets there. And while he may read the briefing books, he evidences none of the judgment, restraint, and the taut and tempered boldness required of a president at junctures of maximum danger.
That matters profoundly.
Mitt’s golden gaffes in London manifest not only his incapacity abroad, but his lack of sound instinct—of the qualities that are the bedrock of the hardest presidential decisions. Michael Kingsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say." And Romney, in his gaffes over the past week and all through his long years of campaigning, has exposed his true self as superficial, cynical—unprepared to respond wisely and well to tests to political leadership. If he fumbled to predictable questions in London, imagine how he would do in the sudden perilous challenges of the presidency.
He has traveled overseas and played the part of “The Ugly American.” In the novel of that title, the real ugly American was a hero, an unhandsome engineer who actually bothered to understand the Asian nation he was trying to help as it faced a Communist insurgency. But the phrase has come to stand for something else described in the novel—a typology of arrogance and obliviousness that fits Mitt the malaprop: he’s a tightly wound, but conspicuously out-of-touch—a caricature of those Americans the book describes who “go to a foreign country...[and] are loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they’re frightened and defensive; or maybe they’re not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.”
Whatever the cause, there is reason to think that Romney is not ready on day one—or day three hundred—for the demand of leading America in a complicated and dangerous world. There’s more than a chance that, with his gifts of misjudgment, he would be dangerous in the White House.
One thing is sure: Romney is dangerous to his own campaign. His handlers will do everything they can to keep him strapped to that message box until the election. They doubtlessly wish they had gone to Ohio or Florida instead of the land of small roads and small houses. But if he had stayed home, who knows what might have emerged from the mouth of this unnatural, animatronic politician if he had stumbled off script? Remember “I like being able to fire people”?
You see, Mitt can’t help himself—even when he’s supposed to be pre-canned. Go back to that fundraising dinner with Sheldon Adelson and company; oops, I mean breakfast. Romney had scheduled the dinner for Tisha B’AB, a Holy Day when observant Jews fast for 25 hours. At the rescheduled breakfast the morning, he casually let slip an ethnic stereotype. “Jewish culture,” he said, is responsible for Israel’s prosperity and the disparity between the Israeli and Palestinian economies. That is both inaccurate and insensitive. It’s a good thing Romney left the country right afterwards—or he might have said “some of his best friends are...”
In Poland, the Romney team made it three-for-three in botched opportunities overseas when spokesman Rick Gorka—firing back at reporters peppering the candidate with questions about his press-shyness—was caught on camera shouting at reporters: “kiss my ass.” (He later apologized.)
But just wait. When Romney returns from baiting the Russian (not Soviet) bear during his final stop in Poland, he’ll will have a little over 90 days of campaigning left—and he will trip over his tongue again and again.
He’s the prince of verbal pratfalls, overseas and at home. And in a sense, that’s a good thing because the more you see and hear him in this presidential campaign, the more you know he’s just not up to the job.
The Perpetual Foot-In-Mouth Disease of "Mitt the Twit" Romney
From The Washington Post -- July 30, 2012:
Romney tour ’12 — Gaffepalooza
By Eugene Robinson, Published: July 30
How is Mitt Romney’s summer vacation going? Fine, except for frequent pauses to remove foot from mouth.
He began his “Look At Me, I’m a Statesman” overseas tour by offending the people of the United Kingdom. To put it mildly, Romney is no genius at reading the mood of an audience. But even he realized things were not going well when he saw tabloid headlines such as “Mitt the Twit” and “Nowhere Man.”
Romney’s offense — he said there were “disconcerting” signs that London might not be ready to host the Olympics — was silly but not inconsequential. It actually revealed quite a lot about how the candidate sees himself and his place in the world.
What Romney knows about running the Olympics is exceeded only by what Romney thinks he knows about running the Olympics. As Prime Minister David Cameron obliquely noted, staging the games in London isn’t the same as staging them in Salt Lake City. British organizers are working amid the bustle of one of the great cities of the world, Cameron said, not out in “the middle of nowhere.”
Such distinctions are lost on Romney, about whom it is becoming possible to make a few generalizations. He tends to be arrogant about his accomplishments and dismissive of those who, in his estimation, fall short. He does not regard disparities in circumstances as relevant. Anyone who falls short of his achievements must be insufficiently smart or not a hard worker, and perhaps suffers from some moral debility as well.
Thus it doesn’t matter if you’re operating within the context of a small, empty city or a big, crowded one. It doesn’t matter if you are, say, the son of a wealthy corporate titan who became a prominent governor, or the son of a single mother who lives in public housing. Romney earned $250 million and has a dressage horse competing in the Olympics, and, therefore, you can too.
Some will accuse me of attributing views to Romney that I can’t possibly know he holds. My response is that I base this on what I can observe, while working with limited information. I’ll be happy to make a reassessment as soon as we get a look at those tax returns Romney is so determined to hide.
Even if you grant Romney’s Olympic expertise, what in the world was he thinking when he reached London? Given the context, anyone trying to show how well he can represent his country abroad — in fact, any polite human being — would know to give an anodyne response about how great the city looks and how wonderful the games will surely be.
After being ridiculed by the British press and dismissed by London Mayor Boris Johnson as “a guy called Mitt Romney,” the candidate left without even seeing his dancing horse perform. His next stop was Israel, where his mouth continued to outrace his mind.
Romney’s purpose there was, let’s be honest, to pander. His aim was to cut into President Obama’s big lead among Jewish voters, and he sought to do this by trying to sound more hawkishly committed to Israel’s security without actually departing from Obama’s policies, which are as pro-Israel as those of any U.S. administration.
Romney did this pretty well, for a while. He managed to win headlines by declaring that “any and all measures” should be used to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons — which is precisely the Obama position. When a foreign policy adviser, Dan Senor, suggested that Romney would support a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Romney stuck to his tough-sounding but vague position. Romney also promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — something George W. Bush promised in 2000 but never quite got around to doing.
But Romney strayed from the script at a fundraiser when he said culture was a prime reason why Israel was so much more prosperous than the occupied territories under control of the Palestinian Authority. “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said.
Palestinians noted that one of those “few other things” is the decades-long Israeli occupation that strictly controls the movement of goods and people. Romney’s riff on culture “is a racist statement,” said Saeb Erakat, a longtime Palestinian official.
Romney wants to project bold confidence. Instead, he radiates blind certainty. All around the world, people can tell the difference.
Romney tour ’12 — Gaffepalooza
By Eugene Robinson, Published: July 30
How is Mitt Romney’s summer vacation going? Fine, except for frequent pauses to remove foot from mouth.
He began his “Look At Me, I’m a Statesman” overseas tour by offending the people of the United Kingdom. To put it mildly, Romney is no genius at reading the mood of an audience. But even he realized things were not going well when he saw tabloid headlines such as “Mitt the Twit” and “Nowhere Man.”
Romney’s offense — he said there were “disconcerting” signs that London might not be ready to host the Olympics — was silly but not inconsequential. It actually revealed quite a lot about how the candidate sees himself and his place in the world.
What Romney knows about running the Olympics is exceeded only by what Romney thinks he knows about running the Olympics. As Prime Minister David Cameron obliquely noted, staging the games in London isn’t the same as staging them in Salt Lake City. British organizers are working amid the bustle of one of the great cities of the world, Cameron said, not out in “the middle of nowhere.”
Such distinctions are lost on Romney, about whom it is becoming possible to make a few generalizations. He tends to be arrogant about his accomplishments and dismissive of those who, in his estimation, fall short. He does not regard disparities in circumstances as relevant. Anyone who falls short of his achievements must be insufficiently smart or not a hard worker, and perhaps suffers from some moral debility as well.
Thus it doesn’t matter if you’re operating within the context of a small, empty city or a big, crowded one. It doesn’t matter if you are, say, the son of a wealthy corporate titan who became a prominent governor, or the son of a single mother who lives in public housing. Romney earned $250 million and has a dressage horse competing in the Olympics, and, therefore, you can too.
Some will accuse me of attributing views to Romney that I can’t possibly know he holds. My response is that I base this on what I can observe, while working with limited information. I’ll be happy to make a reassessment as soon as we get a look at those tax returns Romney is so determined to hide.
Even if you grant Romney’s Olympic expertise, what in the world was he thinking when he reached London? Given the context, anyone trying to show how well he can represent his country abroad — in fact, any polite human being — would know to give an anodyne response about how great the city looks and how wonderful the games will surely be.
After being ridiculed by the British press and dismissed by London Mayor Boris Johnson as “a guy called Mitt Romney,” the candidate left without even seeing his dancing horse perform. His next stop was Israel, where his mouth continued to outrace his mind.
Romney’s purpose there was, let’s be honest, to pander. His aim was to cut into President Obama’s big lead among Jewish voters, and he sought to do this by trying to sound more hawkishly committed to Israel’s security without actually departing from Obama’s policies, which are as pro-Israel as those of any U.S. administration.
Romney did this pretty well, for a while. He managed to win headlines by declaring that “any and all measures” should be used to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons — which is precisely the Obama position. When a foreign policy adviser, Dan Senor, suggested that Romney would support a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Romney stuck to his tough-sounding but vague position. Romney also promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — something George W. Bush promised in 2000 but never quite got around to doing.
But Romney strayed from the script at a fundraiser when he said culture was a prime reason why Israel was so much more prosperous than the occupied territories under control of the Palestinian Authority. “I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said.
Palestinians noted that one of those “few other things” is the decades-long Israeli occupation that strictly controls the movement of goods and people. Romney’s riff on culture “is a racist statement,” said Saeb Erakat, a longtime Palestinian official.
Romney wants to project bold confidence. Instead, he radiates blind certainty. All around the world, people can tell the difference.
How Mitt Romney Has Become The Village Idiot
From The Washington Post -- July 30, 2012:
By Richard Cohen: The gap in the ‘you didn’t build that’ fight
My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.
It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”
This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally — and I mean like totally — “disconcerting.” As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that “the context is worse than the quote.” OMG!
Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party’s heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble.
Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government.” The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed.
Romney’s embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won’t call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney’s important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference.
But so has the government — in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel’s high-tech sector — and, to Israel’s chagrin, America’s as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up.
As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.
By Richard Cohen: The gap in the ‘you didn’t build that’ fight
My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor — and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army’s dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.
It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne’s “No man is an island” by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: “Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”
This observation, so obvious you’d think it didn’t have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from “Das Kapital” or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama’s version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally — and I mean like totally — “disconcerting.” As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that “the context is worse than the quote.” OMG!
Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded — $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party’s heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble.
Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. “American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self,” the magazine says. “Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right’s hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government.” The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed.
Romney’s embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won’t call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney’s important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference.
But so has the government — in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel’s high-tech sector — and, to Israel’s chagrin, America’s as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up.
As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn’t take the village idiot.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Why Mitt Romney and the Republicans Will Lose the 2012 Election
From The Daily Beast -- July 15, 2012:
Obama Is Winning Because of the Shrinking GOP
The economy is weak and Americans are unhappy. But Obama’s ahead because the GOP is an aristocratic party that favors the super rich. And Mitt Romney is its perfect poster boy.
Mitt Romney’s present travails must surely seem shocking and offensive to Republicans, both panjandrums and rank and file alike: “His is a great American success story. How can this be bad? The controversy must be all the fault of that evil liberal media and the Democrat Party!” Well, folks, sorry, but it’s not. If you’re willing to spend two minutes scouring the landscape for explanations rather than enemies, it might strike you that outsourcing is a real issue in American life—millions of citizens have been affected by it, and by definition, none of them for the better. That the ongoing Bain saga is such a shock and outrage to conservatives shows me only that conservatives are profoundly out of touch with the moderate center of the country: It helps explain why you selected this man as your nominee, and it further helps explain why he’s losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out.
Supporters stand in 100-degree temperatures to listen to President Barack Obama speak at a campaign event on the College of Fine Arts Lawn at Carnegie Mellon University July 5, 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads—narrowly, but outside the margin of error—in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states—and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close—he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. But the fact is, as I wrote at the beginning of the week, Romney should be six points ahead. At least four. The congressional Republican strategy—disgraceful but successful—of opposing Obama on everything has largely worked. The biggest thing Obama did manage to pass was wildly unpopular, though matters are improving for him a bit on the health-care front. Obama was soundly rebuked in the mid-term elections. And yet for all that and more, Silver has Obama pegged at roughly a 66 percent chance of winning. That’s not insurmountable in July, but if that’s still the number after both conventions, it’s pretty close to over.
Why? One reason is that, as Peter Beinart argued yesterday, Obama is simply a lot more likeable than Romney. Certainly no arguing with that. Blech! But there’s more to it. It’s the whole Republican Party that’s not likeable.
Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers...into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way—electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008—the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).
The GOP has no moderate faction anymore. It’s a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning.
The Republican hold on this bloc is real, but it is, as we all know, completely about race and culture. I say this not to insult these voters. Far from it, in fact. I don’t think they’re stupid people. I think they’re entirely rational and have decided that culture is more important to them than economics, and so they’ve thrown in with the GOP on cultural grounds, even while they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.
But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes. It’s not a coincidence that, just a year after the Republicans took power in the House, and the public had a good chance to size them up, the GOP as of January was at its lowest point in terms of party-identification percentage since 1988, just 27 percent. The Democrats have lost ground, too, but at least they’re still in the low 30s.
Back to Bain. It’s interesting to think back now to the GOP primary. Romney’s Bain experience was nothing but a plus then. Oh, yes, he was attacked on “vulture capitalism” grounds by Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. But those attacks did in Perry and Gingrich, not Romney. They elevated Romney. The base rallied around him at that point, and the establishment ditto. It wasn’t so much that people suddenly decided they loved Romney. They were punishing Gingrich and Perry for resorting to “left-wing” attacks. But if the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously.
But Republicans high and low couldn’t see this, because the party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out. If it had had a middle, someone within the party might have been able to issue warnings that Romney’s c.v. maybe carried some downsides. This may sound ironic, since Romney is considered the moderate of the group that sought the nomination, but in terms of biography, he’s the least moderate of all of them. In terms of biography, he’s a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.
Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.
Obama Is Winning Because of the Shrinking GOP
The economy is weak and Americans are unhappy. But Obama’s ahead because the GOP is an aristocratic party that favors the super rich. And Mitt Romney is its perfect poster boy.
Mitt Romney’s present travails must surely seem shocking and offensive to Republicans, both panjandrums and rank and file alike: “His is a great American success story. How can this be bad? The controversy must be all the fault of that evil liberal media and the Democrat Party!” Well, folks, sorry, but it’s not. If you’re willing to spend two minutes scouring the landscape for explanations rather than enemies, it might strike you that outsourcing is a real issue in American life—millions of citizens have been affected by it, and by definition, none of them for the better. That the ongoing Bain saga is such a shock and outrage to conservatives shows me only that conservatives are profoundly out of touch with the moderate center of the country: It helps explain why you selected this man as your nominee, and it further helps explain why he’s losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out.
Supporters stand in 100-degree temperatures to listen to President Barack Obama speak at a campaign event on the College of Fine Arts Lawn at Carnegie Mellon University July 5, 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads—narrowly, but outside the margin of error—in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states—and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close—he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. But the fact is, as I wrote at the beginning of the week, Romney should be six points ahead. At least four. The congressional Republican strategy—disgraceful but successful—of opposing Obama on everything has largely worked. The biggest thing Obama did manage to pass was wildly unpopular, though matters are improving for him a bit on the health-care front. Obama was soundly rebuked in the mid-term elections. And yet for all that and more, Silver has Obama pegged at roughly a 66 percent chance of winning. That’s not insurmountable in July, but if that’s still the number after both conventions, it’s pretty close to over.
Why? One reason is that, as Peter Beinart argued yesterday, Obama is simply a lot more likeable than Romney. Certainly no arguing with that. Blech! But there’s more to it. It’s the whole Republican Party that’s not likeable.
Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers...into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way—electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008—the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).
The GOP has no moderate faction anymore. It’s a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning.
The Republican hold on this bloc is real, but it is, as we all know, completely about race and culture. I say this not to insult these voters. Far from it, in fact. I don’t think they’re stupid people. I think they’re entirely rational and have decided that culture is more important to them than economics, and so they’ve thrown in with the GOP on cultural grounds, even while they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.
But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes. It’s not a coincidence that, just a year after the Republicans took power in the House, and the public had a good chance to size them up, the GOP as of January was at its lowest point in terms of party-identification percentage since 1988, just 27 percent. The Democrats have lost ground, too, but at least they’re still in the low 30s.
Back to Bain. It’s interesting to think back now to the GOP primary. Romney’s Bain experience was nothing but a plus then. Oh, yes, he was attacked on “vulture capitalism” grounds by Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. But those attacks did in Perry and Gingrich, not Romney. They elevated Romney. The base rallied around him at that point, and the establishment ditto. It wasn’t so much that people suddenly decided they loved Romney. They were punishing Gingrich and Perry for resorting to “left-wing” attacks. But if the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously.
But Republicans high and low couldn’t see this, because the party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out. If it had had a middle, someone within the party might have been able to issue warnings that Romney’s c.v. maybe carried some downsides. This may sound ironic, since Romney is considered the moderate of the group that sought the nomination, but in terms of biography, he’s the least moderate of all of them. In terms of biography, he’s a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.
Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Mitt bears no responsibility for the activities as the “chairman of the board, chief executive officer of Bain Capital;
From The Washington Post -- July 12, 2012:
New Bain revelations put Romney in tough spot
By Greg Sargent
The Romney campaign has now responded to the big Boston Globe story pointing out that Romney is identified as a CEO of Bain Capital in SEC documents for several years after 1999, when he claimed he left the company. The story could be a big deal, because it could make it harder for Romney to avoid association with Bain’s more controversial deals — which are central to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney.
Dylan Byers has statements from Romney campaign advisers. One reiterates that Romney left in 1999 and “had no input on investments or management of companies after that point.” A second says: “He was on the SEC filings becasue he was still technically the owner, but hadn’t transferred ownership to other partners.”
In fairness to the Romney camp, one of the story’s key revelations is a bit thin. The lede claims that in the time period in question, Romney created “five new investment partnerships.” But later in the story, that assertion gets more vague.
Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, who recently wrote that the Obama campaign was falsely blaming Romney for Bain deals that happened after he left, again dismisses the significance of the new allegations. “Just because you are listed as an owner of shares does not mean you have a managerial role,” Kessler wrote, though he said he might take another look at the issue.
But here’s my question. Even if you accept that there’s no evidence Romney had direct involvement in Bain’s investment decisions, is this really the type of argument that’s going to fly with voters? My guess is that the distinction the Romney campaign is making here will be lost on them. They are unlikely to buy the argument that Romney bears no responsibility for the activites of a company during a period in which he is listed as the “chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” of the company.
The Romney camp’s preferred framing of this story is that we should focus only on whether he had direct managerial control over the investments in question. On a conference call with reporters just now, however, Obama campaign counsel Bob Bauer strongly hinted that evidence of more direct involvement would soon emerge. “I would stay very much tuned on that,” he said
Whether or not more evidence emerges, though, at the present moment the best possible argument here for Romney is that he should not be associated with the activities of a company at which he was listed as the CEO and chairman. Is this type of association really not fair game in politics? That’s an open question, and one that campaigns answer in varying ways, depending on whether they are the target or the accuser. But one thing is clear: It's a very tough argument to make convincingly. My guess is that even some of Romney supporters are going to start expressing discomfort over this.
New Bain revelations put Romney in tough spot
By Greg Sargent
The Romney campaign has now responded to the big Boston Globe story pointing out that Romney is identified as a CEO of Bain Capital in SEC documents for several years after 1999, when he claimed he left the company. The story could be a big deal, because it could make it harder for Romney to avoid association with Bain’s more controversial deals — which are central to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney.
Dylan Byers has statements from Romney campaign advisers. One reiterates that Romney left in 1999 and “had no input on investments or management of companies after that point.” A second says: “He was on the SEC filings becasue he was still technically the owner, but hadn’t transferred ownership to other partners.”
In fairness to the Romney camp, one of the story’s key revelations is a bit thin. The lede claims that in the time period in question, Romney created “five new investment partnerships.” But later in the story, that assertion gets more vague.
Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, who recently wrote that the Obama campaign was falsely blaming Romney for Bain deals that happened after he left, again dismisses the significance of the new allegations. “Just because you are listed as an owner of shares does not mean you have a managerial role,” Kessler wrote, though he said he might take another look at the issue.
But here’s my question. Even if you accept that there’s no evidence Romney had direct involvement in Bain’s investment decisions, is this really the type of argument that’s going to fly with voters? My guess is that the distinction the Romney campaign is making here will be lost on them. They are unlikely to buy the argument that Romney bears no responsibility for the activites of a company during a period in which he is listed as the “chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” of the company.
The Romney camp’s preferred framing of this story is that we should focus only on whether he had direct managerial control over the investments in question. On a conference call with reporters just now, however, Obama campaign counsel Bob Bauer strongly hinted that evidence of more direct involvement would soon emerge. “I would stay very much tuned on that,” he said
Whether or not more evidence emerges, though, at the present moment the best possible argument here for Romney is that he should not be associated with the activities of a company at which he was listed as the CEO and chairman. Is this type of association really not fair game in politics? That’s an open question, and one that campaigns answer in varying ways, depending on whether they are the target or the accuser. But one thing is clear: It's a very tough argument to make convincingly. My guess is that even some of Romney supporters are going to start expressing discomfort over this.
Mitt Romney -- A Republican Candidate that Abraham Lincoln Would Repudiate
From The Washington Post -- June 12, 2012:
In appeal to NAACP, Biden warns of refighting civil rights battles under Romney
Vice President Joe Biden addresses the NAACP annual convention in Houston on July 12.
By David Nakamura
Vice President Biden made an impassioned appeal Thursday to members of the nation’s oldest civil rights group to rally behind President Obama and reject a Republican vision for the country that Biden said would roll back progress for minorities.
Speaking at the NAACP conference in Houston a day after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared there, Biden delivered a sharp rebuttal to Romney’s contention that his policies would be better for black families than Obama’s have been at a time when unemployment among African Americans is 14.4 percent.
Cheers erupted at the NAACP convention Wednesday as Vice President Biden praised President Obama’s push for health-care reform during his first term in office.
Biden sketched out what he said is the Republican Party’s hostile position toward the middle and working classes on voting rights, health care, taxes and education to argue that a Romney administration would be detrimental to blacks.
The vice president played to the crowd, sending a shout-out to friends in the Delaware delegation and recalling his work on voting rights during his time on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Did you think we’d be fighting these battles again?” he said. “I didn’t think we’d be back. I remember working with Republicans — and by the way, this ain’t your father’s Republican Party — on “motor voter” [legislation], expanding the [voting] franchise. Some of these were Republican ideas. This is not the Republican Party’s view today, nor Romney’s. They see a different future in which voting is harder [rather] than easier.”
Biden added, “There’s a lot more to say, but this is preaching to the choir.”
Indeed it was. Polls show that black voters overwhelmingly support Obama, even if they are frustrated by the economy and the unemployment rate, which is far higher among African Americans than the general population.
Whereas Romney drew three sets of boos from the same audience, Biden received a warm welcome and applause throughout. When he said he would wrap up his speech, some in the audience shouted, “No!”
Before Biden spoke, Obama addressed the audience via video message. The president, echoing his campaign stump speech, told the crowd that his administration is committed to a country where “no matter who you are or what you look like or where you come from, America is a place where you can make it if you try.”
On Wednesday, Romney had told the NAACP that Obama has failed in his bid to restore prosperity and security.
“If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him,” Romney said, drawing boos.
Ticking through a list of Obama’s accomplishments — bailing out the auto industry, signing health-care reform legislation, ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden — Biden argued that the president achieved those feats despite Republican obstructionism.
“They were seas of obstruction,” he said. “Their discipline was amazing. They never let up. But neither has my guy, neither has Barack Obama. He hasn’t given up.”
Biden linked Romney directly to Capitol Hill Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), and argued that under a Romney administration, they would collude to undo critical reforms.
“Close your eyes and imagine — imagine what the Romney Justice Department would look like,” Biden said, drawing shouts of “No!” from the crowd. “Imagine who he’d recommend to be the attorney general or head of the civil rights division. Imagine what the Supreme Court will look like after four years of a Romney presidency.
“This election, in my view, is a fight for the heart and soul of America,” he continued, adding of Republicans: “These guys aren’t bad guys, they just have a fundamentally different view.”
In appeal to NAACP, Biden warns of refighting civil rights battles under Romney
Vice President Joe Biden addresses the NAACP annual convention in Houston on July 12.
By David Nakamura
Vice President Biden made an impassioned appeal Thursday to members of the nation’s oldest civil rights group to rally behind President Obama and reject a Republican vision for the country that Biden said would roll back progress for minorities.
Speaking at the NAACP conference in Houston a day after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared there, Biden delivered a sharp rebuttal to Romney’s contention that his policies would be better for black families than Obama’s have been at a time when unemployment among African Americans is 14.4 percent.
Cheers erupted at the NAACP convention Wednesday as Vice President Biden praised President Obama’s push for health-care reform during his first term in office.
Biden sketched out what he said is the Republican Party’s hostile position toward the middle and working classes on voting rights, health care, taxes and education to argue that a Romney administration would be detrimental to blacks.
The vice president played to the crowd, sending a shout-out to friends in the Delaware delegation and recalling his work on voting rights during his time on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Did you think we’d be fighting these battles again?” he said. “I didn’t think we’d be back. I remember working with Republicans — and by the way, this ain’t your father’s Republican Party — on “motor voter” [legislation], expanding the [voting] franchise. Some of these were Republican ideas. This is not the Republican Party’s view today, nor Romney’s. They see a different future in which voting is harder [rather] than easier.”
Biden added, “There’s a lot more to say, but this is preaching to the choir.”
Indeed it was. Polls show that black voters overwhelmingly support Obama, even if they are frustrated by the economy and the unemployment rate, which is far higher among African Americans than the general population.
Whereas Romney drew three sets of boos from the same audience, Biden received a warm welcome and applause throughout. When he said he would wrap up his speech, some in the audience shouted, “No!”
Before Biden spoke, Obama addressed the audience via video message. The president, echoing his campaign stump speech, told the crowd that his administration is committed to a country where “no matter who you are or what you look like or where you come from, America is a place where you can make it if you try.”
On Wednesday, Romney had told the NAACP that Obama has failed in his bid to restore prosperity and security.
“If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him,” Romney said, drawing boos.
Ticking through a list of Obama’s accomplishments — bailing out the auto industry, signing health-care reform legislation, ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden — Biden argued that the president achieved those feats despite Republican obstructionism.
“They were seas of obstruction,” he said. “Their discipline was amazing. They never let up. But neither has my guy, neither has Barack Obama. He hasn’t given up.”
Biden linked Romney directly to Capitol Hill Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), and argued that under a Romney administration, they would collude to undo critical reforms.
“Close your eyes and imagine — imagine what the Romney Justice Department would look like,” Biden said, drawing shouts of “No!” from the crowd. “Imagine who he’d recommend to be the attorney general or head of the civil rights division. Imagine what the Supreme Court will look like after four years of a Romney presidency.
“This election, in my view, is a fight for the heart and soul of America,” he continued, adding of Republicans: “These guys aren’t bad guys, they just have a fundamentally different view.”
Elect Mitt Romney, America's Liar-In-Chief, to the White House
From The Progress Report -- July 12, 2012:
Who Exactly is Mitt Romney Lying to?
It’s Time for Mitt Romney to Come Clean
An explosive report in today’s Boston Globe has raised even more questions about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and what he’s hiding in his tax returns.
Here’s the rundown.
WHAT MITT ROMNEY SAYS: He says left Bain Capital in February 1999 to go run the Olympics and had nothing to do with the company after that and is therefore not responsible for the factories it closed, workers it laid off, and jobs it shipped overseas.
WHAT OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS SAY:
“Until 2002, when Romney and Bain Capital finalized a severance agreement, he remained the firm’s ‘sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president,’ according to SEC documents. [...]“
“Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain ‘executive’ in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.”
His name appears several times in various official documents filed with the SEC and signed by Romney. For example, his name appears 18 times in this February 14, 2000 filing and seven times in this January 25, 2002 filing.
WHY IT MATTERS: Mitt Romney has either been lying to the public about his role at Bain Capital or filing false documents with the SEC. Here’s how a former SEC commissioner explains it:
Roberta Karmel, a former SEC commissioner who served during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, said the documents raise questions about Romney’s role at Bain after the GOP contender says he left the company.
“It’s a criminal offense to file a false document with the SEC,” Karmel said. “And if that isn’t true, then he made a false filing, which is something I don’t think he wants to claim.”
She continued: “If he listed himself and he was getting paid, he was legally responsible.”
“Either you’re the owner or you’re not the owner,” Karmel added. “You can’t have it both ways.”
And since Romney was legally responsible for Bain Capital and making money from it, he should take responsibility for all of its activities, like these job losses Romney doesn’t want to accept responsibility for:
– GS Industries – 750 Jobs Lost: In a series of ads earlier this year, the Obama campaign hit Romney over Bain Capital’s purchase of GS Industries, a steel company that closed its Kansas City plant and eliminated 750 jobs in February 2001. The Romney campaign responded by claiming that Romney had left Bain Capital well before 2001, and was therefore not tied to the collapse of the GS. Bain Capital and its executives, including Mitt Romney, earned at least $12 million on the initial investment.
– KB Toys – Up to 3,500 Jobs Lost: During the primary season, Newt Gingrich’s 30 minute documentary on Romney and Bain Capital spent a significant amount of time focused on KB Toys, a retail chain bought by Bain in 2000. At the time, the Romney campaign, with an assist from fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, pointed to the calendar. As these new filings show, Romney was still very much at Bain Capital when they purchased KB Toys, and profited mightily when the company took out crippling loans to pay Bain Capital an $83 million dividend.
– Dade International – 1,700 Jobs Lost: Months after Romney claims to have left the company, Bain Capital received a $242 million bounty for its stake in the medical supply company. Romney profited substantially from the deal. In 2002, Dade International filed for bankruptcy, costing more than 1,700 people their jobs. At the time, Romney was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital, the new documents show.
–DDi Corporation – 275 Jobs Lost: In 1996, the circuit board manufacturer was bought by a group of investors, with Bain Capital in the lead, for more than $40 million. By December 1999, DDi closed a Colorado plant and fired 275 workers. Bain Capital, with Romney still listed as Chairman and CEO, then proceeded to take DDi public, raising $170 million during the company’s IPO in 2000. Over the next few months, Bain began selling off its stock, raising almost $100 million, more than doubling its investment. The stock plummeted shortly thereafter.
HOW DO WE GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS: The only way we can get to the bottom of Romney’s time at Bain Capital, his shady foreign accounts and secret Bermuda corporation are for him to release his tax returns going all of the way back to at least 1999. He provided 23 years of tax returns to John McCain in 2008 when he was being vetted for vice president, so it should not be difficult for him to produce them and put all of this to rest. If he continues to keep them secret, one is only left to wonder what Mitt Romney has to hide?
Who Exactly is Mitt Romney Lying to?
It’s Time for Mitt Romney to Come Clean
An explosive report in today’s Boston Globe has raised even more questions about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital and what he’s hiding in his tax returns.
Here’s the rundown.
WHAT MITT ROMNEY SAYS: He says left Bain Capital in February 1999 to go run the Olympics and had nothing to do with the company after that and is therefore not responsible for the factories it closed, workers it laid off, and jobs it shipped overseas.
WHAT OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS SAY:
“Until 2002, when Romney and Bain Capital finalized a severance agreement, he remained the firm’s ‘sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president,’ according to SEC documents. [...]“
“Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain ‘executive’ in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.”
His name appears several times in various official documents filed with the SEC and signed by Romney. For example, his name appears 18 times in this February 14, 2000 filing and seven times in this January 25, 2002 filing.
WHY IT MATTERS: Mitt Romney has either been lying to the public about his role at Bain Capital or filing false documents with the SEC. Here’s how a former SEC commissioner explains it:
Roberta Karmel, a former SEC commissioner who served during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, said the documents raise questions about Romney’s role at Bain after the GOP contender says he left the company.
“It’s a criminal offense to file a false document with the SEC,” Karmel said. “And if that isn’t true, then he made a false filing, which is something I don’t think he wants to claim.”
She continued: “If he listed himself and he was getting paid, he was legally responsible.”
“Either you’re the owner or you’re not the owner,” Karmel added. “You can’t have it both ways.”
And since Romney was legally responsible for Bain Capital and making money from it, he should take responsibility for all of its activities, like these job losses Romney doesn’t want to accept responsibility for:
– GS Industries – 750 Jobs Lost: In a series of ads earlier this year, the Obama campaign hit Romney over Bain Capital’s purchase of GS Industries, a steel company that closed its Kansas City plant and eliminated 750 jobs in February 2001. The Romney campaign responded by claiming that Romney had left Bain Capital well before 2001, and was therefore not tied to the collapse of the GS. Bain Capital and its executives, including Mitt Romney, earned at least $12 million on the initial investment.
– KB Toys – Up to 3,500 Jobs Lost: During the primary season, Newt Gingrich’s 30 minute documentary on Romney and Bain Capital spent a significant amount of time focused on KB Toys, a retail chain bought by Bain in 2000. At the time, the Romney campaign, with an assist from fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, pointed to the calendar. As these new filings show, Romney was still very much at Bain Capital when they purchased KB Toys, and profited mightily when the company took out crippling loans to pay Bain Capital an $83 million dividend.
– Dade International – 1,700 Jobs Lost: Months after Romney claims to have left the company, Bain Capital received a $242 million bounty for its stake in the medical supply company. Romney profited substantially from the deal. In 2002, Dade International filed for bankruptcy, costing more than 1,700 people their jobs. At the time, Romney was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital, the new documents show.
–DDi Corporation – 275 Jobs Lost: In 1996, the circuit board manufacturer was bought by a group of investors, with Bain Capital in the lead, for more than $40 million. By December 1999, DDi closed a Colorado plant and fired 275 workers. Bain Capital, with Romney still listed as Chairman and CEO, then proceeded to take DDi public, raising $170 million during the company’s IPO in 2000. Over the next few months, Bain began selling off its stock, raising almost $100 million, more than doubling its investment. The stock plummeted shortly thereafter.
HOW DO WE GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS: The only way we can get to the bottom of Romney’s time at Bain Capital, his shady foreign accounts and secret Bermuda corporation are for him to release his tax returns going all of the way back to at least 1999. He provided 23 years of tax returns to John McCain in 2008 when he was being vetted for vice president, so it should not be difficult for him to produce them and put all of this to rest. If he continues to keep them secret, one is only left to wonder what Mitt Romney has to hide?
Mitt Romney -- The Secretive, Dishonest Manchurian Stealth Candidate
The more everyone finds out about Mitt Romney's finances, the more questions they have. Perhaps that's why he's hiding as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Today, The Boston Globe reported that Romney was still running Bain Capital two years after he claims he left the firm, directly contradicting his campaign's denial that he was involved in deals that led to layoffs, bankruptcies, and American jobs getting shipped overseas.
It's a pattern of secrecy, and this is just the latest example of him trying to hide the truth from voters. There are a number of issues in play right now -- and voters deserve answers:
1) Mitt Romney refuses to release multiple years of taxes, ignoring decades of precedent.
2) He won't disclose his "bundlers," the people raising millions for his campaign.
3) He is the sole owner of a questionable shell corporation in Bermuda.
4) Until recently, Romney kept cash in a Swiss bank account.
5) According to the Globe, he hasn't been honest about when he was running Bain Capital, even though legal documents refute his claims.
Please forward this email and share this with everyone you know who cares about the outcome of this election.
Everyone deserves the right to judge for themselves whether Romney's motivations, experience, and perspective are what they want in a president. But Mitt Romney doesn't want people to have the information they need to make those judgments.
Today, The Boston Globe reported that Romney was still running Bain Capital two years after he claims he left the firm, directly contradicting his campaign's denial that he was involved in deals that led to layoffs, bankruptcies, and American jobs getting shipped overseas.
It's a pattern of secrecy, and this is just the latest example of him trying to hide the truth from voters. There are a number of issues in play right now -- and voters deserve answers:
1) Mitt Romney refuses to release multiple years of taxes, ignoring decades of precedent.
2) He won't disclose his "bundlers," the people raising millions for his campaign.
3) He is the sole owner of a questionable shell corporation in Bermuda.
4) Until recently, Romney kept cash in a Swiss bank account.
5) According to the Globe, he hasn't been honest about when he was running Bain Capital, even though legal documents refute his claims.
Please forward this email and share this with everyone you know who cares about the outcome of this election.
Everyone deserves the right to judge for themselves whether Romney's motivations, experience, and perspective are what they want in a president. But Mitt Romney doesn't want people to have the information they need to make those judgments.
Mitt Romney Becomes Klansman Rush Limbaugh's Favorite Race-Baiter
From The Daily Beast -- July 12, 2012:
Mitt Romney the Race Baiter at the NAACP
By Michael Tomasky
With his incendiary speech to the NAACP, Mitt crossed an ugly line. No longer simply spineless and disingenuous, he’s now become a race-mongering pyromaniac. Plus Mansfield Frazier on Romney's diversity problem.
Until yesterday, I thought of Mitt Romney as a spineless, disingenuous, and supercilious but more or less decently intentioned person who at least wasn’t the race-mongering pyromaniac that some other Republican candidates of my lifetime have been. Then he gave his speech to the NAACP, and now I think of him as a spineless, disingenuous, supercilious, race-mongering pyromaniac who is very poorly intentioned indeed, and woe to us if this man sets foot in the White House as anything but a tourist.
Mitt Romney addresses the NAACP National Convention on July 11, 2012 in Houston, Texas. (Eric Kayne / Getty Images)
Let’s bat the easy charges out of the way first. Spineless? Please. He’s taken every position the Tea Party base has asked and a few they didn’t. Disingenuous? Easy. Either he’s lying now about health care, abortion rights, his support for Ronald Reagan, and his posture toward Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, or he was lying then. Supercilious? Seems appropriate and perhaps even a bit mild for a man who made fun of NASCAR fans’ rain ponchos and a working-class family’s cookie service.
But he wasn’t a race-baiter until yesterday. That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News. Oh, he said some nice things. And sure, let’s give him one point for going there at all. But listen: You don’t go into the NAACP and use the word “Obamacare” and think that you’re not going to hear some boos. It’s a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president’s supporters consider it an insult. He and his team had to know those boos were coming, and Romney acknowledged as much a few hours later in an interview with . . . guess which channel (hint: it’s the one whose web site often has to close articles about race to commenters because of the blatant racism). Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story “Romney Booed at NAACP” would jazz up their (very white) base.
Blame the media for making such a big deal of it? Come on. When a candidate’s staffers are preparing a speech, they know very well exactly what line the press is going to lead with. Speeches are written with precisely that intent (or if they’re not, someone is sleeping on the job). The mention, for the record, was couched, with appropriate plausible deniability, in the middle of a list of five things he’d do to get the economy humming again. (Speech text here.) Point three concerned reducing government spending and bring down the debt: “To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.”
The context is crucial, and the fact that it was mentioned in passing certainly does not absolve Romney because it was just one item on a list. Think of it this way: If you are trying to talk a friend or co-worker out of a position or belief that you consider to be ill-advised—if, that is, you are actually and earnestly trying to be in that person’s good graces and get through to them—you will make a calm and reasoned case and try to get your target audience to see things your way. You don’t just peremptorily denounce the position you know he is attached to as “non-essential” and say you’ll eliminate it and move on to point four. You would know that that would come across as both condescending and ineffective.
Mitt Romney gets booed at the convention.
Let’s imagine that in 2008 Barack Obama had spoken, oh, to the American Legion—that is, a strongly Republican assemblage—and had spoken of being anxious to get to Pennsylvania Avenue so he could end “Bush and Cheney’s wars.” In fact he did speak (via video) to the American Legion in 2008, and he talked about needing to end the wars, but he sure didn’t use any loaded phrases that he and his speechwriters knew would piss his audience off. Part of the difference is a clear difference in character between the two men. And part of it, of course, is that in our political discourse, pissing off veterans is as bad a mistake as you can make, while pissing off black people usually adds value.
Did I earlier give Romney a point for going to the NAACP at all? I hereby withdraw it.
In 2008, Obama made other appearances to tough crowds. Recall, as the writer Rich Yeselson reminded me yesterday, that he walked into a similar sort of lion’s den that year when he appeared at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church alongside John McCain. Obama may have been deluding himself in thinking that he could win over Warren’s flock, and he stated his positions on abortion rights and other matters clearly. But he somehow managed to walk out of the place without having hurled any gratuitous broadsides at his hosts.
We learned a great deal about Mitt Romney yesterday, and what we learned only adds to the picture of this little, plastic fellow who thinks he can get points from white moderates (as explained by an aide to BuzzFeed) by appearing at the NAACP while generating high-fives on the white right for rubbing dirt in the faces of its members while there. Did I earlier give him a point for going there at all? I hereby withdraw it. He went only to send “signals” to other constituencies entirely. I hope those swing voters he was partly aiming for become aware of just how badly he swung and missed on this one.
Mitt Romney the Race Baiter at the NAACP
By Michael Tomasky
With his incendiary speech to the NAACP, Mitt crossed an ugly line. No longer simply spineless and disingenuous, he’s now become a race-mongering pyromaniac. Plus Mansfield Frazier on Romney's diversity problem.
Until yesterday, I thought of Mitt Romney as a spineless, disingenuous, and supercilious but more or less decently intentioned person who at least wasn’t the race-mongering pyromaniac that some other Republican candidates of my lifetime have been. Then he gave his speech to the NAACP, and now I think of him as a spineless, disingenuous, supercilious, race-mongering pyromaniac who is very poorly intentioned indeed, and woe to us if this man sets foot in the White House as anything but a tourist.
Mitt Romney addresses the NAACP National Convention on July 11, 2012 in Houston, Texas. (Eric Kayne / Getty Images)
Let’s bat the easy charges out of the way first. Spineless? Please. He’s taken every position the Tea Party base has asked and a few they didn’t. Disingenuous? Easy. Either he’s lying now about health care, abortion rights, his support for Ronald Reagan, and his posture toward Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, or he was lying then. Supercilious? Seems appropriate and perhaps even a bit mild for a man who made fun of NASCAR fans’ rain ponchos and a working-class family’s cookie service.
But he wasn’t a race-baiter until yesterday. That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News. Oh, he said some nice things. And sure, let’s give him one point for going there at all. But listen: You don’t go into the NAACP and use the word “Obamacare” and think that you’re not going to hear some boos. It’s a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president’s supporters consider it an insult. He and his team had to know those boos were coming, and Romney acknowledged as much a few hours later in an interview with . . . guess which channel (hint: it’s the one whose web site often has to close articles about race to commenters because of the blatant racism). Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story “Romney Booed at NAACP” would jazz up their (very white) base.
Blame the media for making such a big deal of it? Come on. When a candidate’s staffers are preparing a speech, they know very well exactly what line the press is going to lead with. Speeches are written with precisely that intent (or if they’re not, someone is sleeping on the job). The mention, for the record, was couched, with appropriate plausible deniability, in the middle of a list of five things he’d do to get the economy humming again. (Speech text here.) Point three concerned reducing government spending and bring down the debt: “To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.”
The context is crucial, and the fact that it was mentioned in passing certainly does not absolve Romney because it was just one item on a list. Think of it this way: If you are trying to talk a friend or co-worker out of a position or belief that you consider to be ill-advised—if, that is, you are actually and earnestly trying to be in that person’s good graces and get through to them—you will make a calm and reasoned case and try to get your target audience to see things your way. You don’t just peremptorily denounce the position you know he is attached to as “non-essential” and say you’ll eliminate it and move on to point four. You would know that that would come across as both condescending and ineffective.
Mitt Romney gets booed at the convention.
Let’s imagine that in 2008 Barack Obama had spoken, oh, to the American Legion—that is, a strongly Republican assemblage—and had spoken of being anxious to get to Pennsylvania Avenue so he could end “Bush and Cheney’s wars.” In fact he did speak (via video) to the American Legion in 2008, and he talked about needing to end the wars, but he sure didn’t use any loaded phrases that he and his speechwriters knew would piss his audience off. Part of the difference is a clear difference in character between the two men. And part of it, of course, is that in our political discourse, pissing off veterans is as bad a mistake as you can make, while pissing off black people usually adds value.
Did I earlier give Romney a point for going to the NAACP at all? I hereby withdraw it.
In 2008, Obama made other appearances to tough crowds. Recall, as the writer Rich Yeselson reminded me yesterday, that he walked into a similar sort of lion’s den that year when he appeared at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church alongside John McCain. Obama may have been deluding himself in thinking that he could win over Warren’s flock, and he stated his positions on abortion rights and other matters clearly. But he somehow managed to walk out of the place without having hurled any gratuitous broadsides at his hosts.
We learned a great deal about Mitt Romney yesterday, and what we learned only adds to the picture of this little, plastic fellow who thinks he can get points from white moderates (as explained by an aide to BuzzFeed) by appearing at the NAACP while generating high-fives on the white right for rubbing dirt in the faces of its members while there. Did I earlier give him a point for going there at all? I hereby withdraw it. He went only to send “signals” to other constituencies entirely. I hope those swing voters he was partly aiming for become aware of just how badly he swung and missed on this one.
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