Incorrigible Romney

Last week, Garry Wills -- who has made a career of evaluating America's presidents and would be presidents  -- asked in the New York Review of Books:

What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

Romney lost because a majority of Americans -- admittedly a narrow majority -- realized that he would say anything to win. He was, in the words of Canadian commentator Andrew Cohen, "a confused standard bearer of no philosophical address."

But yesterday, in a call to big donors, Romney essentially repeated what he had said to other backers in that embarrassing 47% clip:

According to reports in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, the former Republican nominee said during a call with donors on Wednesday that Obama had been “very generous” in doling out “big gifts” to “the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people” as well as to women throughout his first term. Benefits such as access to “free health care,” guaranteed contraceptive coverage, more affordable student loans, and “amnesty for children of illegals,” all combined to give the president a decisive edge in popularity.

The truth is that Romney has always had a philosophical address. It's just that, when he was running for president, he didn't want voters to know where he lived. He has now confirmed that he resides in a gated community.


This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

It's About Time Somebody Said It

Readers of this space will know I believe that our present political masters have abandoned the next generation. They say they don't want to saddle the young with impossible debts.  But the truth is that they bear a deep seated animus against government.

It's government that is their enemy -- not the debt. And when you look at their records -- from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Stephen Harper -- you discover that each of them has run up more debt than their predecessors. More tellingly, they never have a word of encouragement for the young. The only encouragement Mitt Romney offered was to borrow the money to go to school from their parents.

Here is a clip of Barack Obama addressing the young volunteers who helped him win on Tuesday. He says what should have been said a long time ago -- and needs to be said now.

And, for those who think that Obama is cold and distant -- well, watch the clip.

On The Ground

Barack Obama has learned a lot in the last four years. During the first two years of his presidency, many of his supporters grumbled that he didn't understand who he was dealing with. When Republicans said that their first priority was to make him a one term president, they were serious.

But the 2010 elections got his attention. And the debt ceiling debacle convinced him that the old admonition, "Early to bed and early to rise. Work like hell and organize" was the only way to deal with his opposition.

And that's why Obama and the Democrats won the White House yesterday.

True, the war on the air waves was relentless. As a Canadian living  just north of New York State, I 'm happy to see it end. But, in the end, it was the ground game that made the difference. Driving voters to voting stations and offering them bottled water as they stood in line, the Democrats got out the votes and they got them out where it counted.

The question now is, what has this election taught the Republicans? There are at least two clues that, if they're smart, they won't miss. The first is that Obama won 70% of the Latino vote. The second is that Romney's electoral fortunes improved markedly when the person  Bill Clinton called "ol' moderate Mitt" showed up.

And the most important lesson of all is that elections are still won on the ground.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Romneyism

Mitt Romney has been the ultimate political chameleon. He has reversed every significant political position he held when he was Governor of Massachusetts. But, Robert Reich writes, there is a coherent philosophy behind his reversals. Reich calls that philosophy Romneyism:

Despite its contradictions and ellipses, Romneyism has an internal coherence. It is different from conservatism, because it does not intend to conserve or protect any particular institutions or values. It is also distinct from  Republicanism, in that it is not rooted in traditional small-town American values, nationalism, or states’ rights.

Reich goes on to enumerate the ten pillars of Romneyism. All of them are important. But the first three are the core upon which the other seven hang:

1. Corporations are the basic units of society. Corporations are people, and the overriding purpose of an economy is to maximize corporate profits. When profits are maximized, the economy grows fastest. This growth benefits everyone in the form greater output, better products and services, and higher share prices.

2. Workers are a means to the goal of maximizing corporate profits. If workers do not contribute to that goal, they should be fired. If they cannot then find other work that helps maximize profits in another company, their wages must be too high, and they must therefore accept steadily lower wages until they find a job.

3. All factors of production – capital, physical plant and equipment, workers – are fungible and should be treated the same. Any that fail to deliver high competitive returns should be replaced or discarded. This keeps an economy efficient. Fairness is and should be irrelevant.

What's interesting about these first three pillars is that they are a throwback to the capitalism of the nineteenth century. This is the capitalism of William Blake's "dark satanic mills."  This is a throwback to Mr. Peabody's coal mines and Mr Carnegie's steel mills. Romneyism is a hymn to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and a complete rejection of Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal.

Romney -- with his two Harvard degrees -- wants to lead the nation backwards. This, he says, is his better idea.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Perverse Politics

Mitt Romney's supporters are engaging in the same kind of perverse politics which the Romney campaign has practiced. Two days ago, David Brooks suggested that there was an upside to Romney's opportunism: If Americans elect Romney, Brooks wrote, he will work with intransigent Republicans and more reasonable Democrats.

Brooks is not the only one to make this argument. The Demoines Register has based its endorsement of Romney on the same argument, as has the Orlando Sentinel. Ezra Klein writes that these endorsements validate Mitch McConnell and John Boehner's policy of unrestrained obstruction:

These endorsements are proving Republicans right. As they show, the Republican strategy to deny the president any cooperation and make his Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place has done Obama enormous political damage. In that way, the endorsements get the situation backwards. 

However, there is a huge downside to this strategy:

If this strategy wins Republicans the election, they’ll employ it next time they face a Democratic president, too, and congressional Democrats will use it against the next Republicans. Rewarding the minority for doing everything in their power to make the majority fail sets up disastrous incentives for the political system.

If Romney wins the election, respect for the truth in political campaigns will have reached a new low. But, more ominously, he and the Republicans will have ushered in a new set of political imperatives which will shake the foundations of the American political system.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Standing Athwart History

For those of us who live outside the United States, the angry divide there is profoundly puzzling. There are, indeed, two philosophies of government at stake in this election. But the anger suggests that the fault lines run deeper than that. Eugene Robinson's column in this morning's Washington Post offers an important insight into the battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: "It is too simplistic to conclude," he writes, "that demography equals destiny.

Both men are being sincere when they vow to serve the interests of all Americans. But it would be disingenuous to pretend not to notice the obvious cleavage between those who have long held power in this society and those who are beginning to attain it.

The United States has changed radically in the last thirty years. While Republicans were actualizing the Reagan Revolution, there were all kinds of other revolutions taking place:

In my lifetime, we’ve experienced the civil rights movement, the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement and an unprecedented wave of Latino immigration. Within a few decades, there will be no white majority in this country — no majority of any kind, in fact. We will be a nation of racial and ethnic minorities, and we will only prosper if everyone learns to give and take.

Our place in the world has changed as well. The United States remains the dominant economic and military power; our ideals remain a beacon for those around the globe still yearning to breathe free. But our capacity for unilateral action is diminished; we can assert but not dictate, and we must learn to persuade.

While the Reaganites desperately tried to return to the world of Ward and June Cleaver, the ground shifted under their feet. The presence of an African American in the White House is a daily reminder of how much the ground has shifted.

Republicans dearly hope to accomplish what the late William F. Buckley sought to do in the pages of National Review: to "stand athwart history, yelling stop!" and to "tell the violated businessman's side of the story."

We all have wished to go back to an idyllic past. Thomas Wolfe, however, understood how the world works. "You Can't," he wrote, "Go Home Again."

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Losing Candidate Or Losing Party?

As Republicans bemoan the growing lead Barack Obama has over Mitt Romney in the polls, they are turning on Romney, calling him a bad candidate. That's passing strange. Romney has espoused all the party's current positions -- even if they are contrary to positions he has held in the past.

Richard Cohen writes in The  Washington Post that -- even if Romney is a robotic candidate -- the real problem lies not with Romney but with his party and its primaries:

Since Republicans are so focused on the individual and not on the system that produced him, they miss the real problem. The system in this case is the series of incredibly damaging primaries and caucuses that, in the crucial early stages, produce a candidate who could sweep Bavaria. The Iowa caucuses alone take the GOP so far to the right that it all but dooms the winner. Romney had to vow to stop thinking. He had to virtually declare himself anti-Hispanic (criticizing Texas for providing tuition discounts to the college-age children of illegal immigrants). While he has now moderated his approach, it is a bit late. Hispanic is not Spanish for Stupid.

Consider what have become core Republican beliefs:

 A GOP candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage, deny global warming and insist — against all evidence — that local control of education is the best. The only way around these positions is to skip the Iowa caucuses entirely. It is no place for a moderate. It is, really, no place for a thinking person.

The truth is that Mitt Romney is the last of a dying breed -- the moderate Republican. Names like Edward Brooke, Charles Percy and Mark Hatfield spring to mind. Go a little further back and you'll encounter Everett Dirksen and, yes, Dwight Eisenhower.

Romney is losing because the Republican Party has no place for him. And this election is proving that the majority of American voters have no place for the Republican Party.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Republican Contempt For The Working Class

Michael Kingsley famously defined a "gaffe" as when a politician unwittingly tells the truth. And the truth behind Mitt Romney's "47%" gaffe, Paul Krugman writes, is that Romney and his party have nothing but contempt for the working class:

Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”

What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes. 

The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Ayn Rand. In the past there were Republicans who had workers' interests at heart. And, even those Republicans who had nothing in common with working men and women, Krugman writes,

knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.

Lincoln's concept of government and his party have been corrupted by big money. Today's Republicans are "a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect." 

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Triumph Of Political Cynicism

Out on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have been arguing that Barack Obama is a failed president.  They claim that he didn't do anything when he controlled both houses of congress. But Paul Krugman takes a quick trip down memory lane:

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.

And, so, Obama's American Jobs Act went nowhere. As Bill Clinton said last week at the Democratic Convention, "It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did." But brass is the strategy behind the Republican campaign. If the Jobs Act had passed:

the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.  

But, say Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan, Obama failed to do what he promised. Yet it was Mitch McConnell who declared that jobs were not his party's first priority. Removing Mr.Obama from office was their first and most important job.

Mr. Romney's changing positions are proof that he will do whatever it takes to win. In fact, the party he represents will also do whatever it takes. So much for principle. The Republican campaign is totally cynical.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

The Pink Elephants Have Left The Big Top

Now that the Republican Convention is over, what have we learned? It would appear that not much has changed. Economic policy remains the same -- the party favours the wealthy over the working man. But, more strikingly, the party of George W. Bush -- which did not feel beholden to the "reality based community" -- certainly now refuses to be "dictated by fact checkers."

If there is a difference between the party of 2000 and the party of 2012, it is merely a matter of degree. The GOP now has more contempt for facts than it did a decade ago. Those non existent weapons of mass destruction have not caused a rethink. Truth be told, Paul Krugman writes, Mr. Ryan tells bigger whoppers than George W. did:

For Mr. Ryan, as you may recall, has positioned himself as an icon of truth-telling and fiscal responsibility, while offering policy proposals that are neither honest nor responsible. He calls for huge tax cuts, while proposing specific spending cuts that, while inflicting immense hardship on our most vulnerable citizens, would fall far short of making up for the revenue loss. His claims to reduce the deficit therefore rely on assertions that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes that he refuses to specify, and achieve further huge spending cuts in ways that he also refuses to specify.

At least Ryan is consistent. Romney, however, doesn't know the meaning of the word. Dan Gardiner writes that Romney has campaigned :

as a moderate, a pragmatist, even a liberal. He has campaigned as conservative one long shot of Ted Nugent’s bow to the right of Ronald Reagan. He has been pro-choice, pro-life, pro-whatever the hell the polls say he needs to be to win. His greatest accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts was the implementation of a policy that ensured health care for everyone in the state yet he is now campaigning to win the White House by fiercely attacking ObamaCare, which is essentially the same policy implemented by Barack Obama at the federal level.

Watching the Republican convention was like watching that segment in Dumbo where the little fellow with the big ears mistakenly snoots too much whiskey laced water. He hiccups and blows several pink elephants up and around the big top. Clint Eastwood's speech was the biggest pink elephant of all. As an accomplished actor, he should have remembered what happened to Macbeth after he began talking to empty chairs.

Still, the crowd ate it up. That master of the big top, P.T. Barnum, was right. There really is a sucker born every minute.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Race In The Race

Frank Bruni writes, in this morning's New York Times, that race is still at the center of the American presidential contest:

Although race represents a less central dynamic for Obama now than it did in 2008, it’s a factor in his political fortunes nonetheless. It poisons some of his opponents, pumping them full of a toxic zeal beyond the partisan norm. How else to explain their obsession with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or the lunatic persistence of the “birthers,” including the Arizona secretary of state, who didn’t drop his threat to keep Obama off the state ballot until Wednesday? Even as he quieted down, Donald Trump piped up, raising questions yet again about where Obama was born, though Trump’s motivations are surely less racist than narcissistic, even entrepreneurial. For him attention is attention and ratings are ratings, no matter how repulsively drummed up. 

Life would be so much easier for Americans if the race question would disappear. But it is part of America's DNA. Perhaps it will always be so. On the other hand, it is part of the theme of hope and change which Obama ran on in 2008:

 He still personifies the hope, to borrow a noun that he has used, that we really might evolve into the colorblind, fair-minded country that many of us want. His own saga taps into the larger story of this country’s fitful, unfinished progress toward its stated ideal of equal opportunity.

And that is the essential problem Mitt Romney faces. He personifies success. But he has not established an emotional connection with voters. Nobody questions Romney's success as a businessman, as a father or a husband. But Obama speaks to America's aspirations. Romney speaks to its bottom line.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

When Every Vote Counts

Every several decades, David Shribman writes, the United States has an election in which "the country seems to approach one of the hinges of history." The election of 2012  will be such an election. While a significant number of voters may be in the center, the nation's two political parties are not:

Sometimes, it seems as if the two parties are occupying different universes. In Congress, where liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats once made common cause, the chasm between the two parties is wider than the aisles that separate them – indeed, wider than at any time in memory. In fact, for the first time in the modern era, there’s no ideological intersection between the two parties. The most liberal Republican, a phrase that increasingly is an oxymoron, is more conservative than the most conservative Democrat, a phrase that also seems an antique.

Faced with such a stark choice, a lot of voters could choose to stay home. They did that recently in Canada, where the Liberal Party -- which has always occupied the political center -- was almost reduced to an historical footnote. But, as Canadians are discovering, even with the support of only 25% of the voting public, the winning side is proceeding -- full speed ahead -- on its agenda.

So, one way or another, Americans are going to get the complete package. Their problem will be to decide which package they prefer. Shribman writes:

Here are some of the questions at issue: Should the country press ahead with a comprehensive overhaul of health care or peel away at the Obamacare program passed in 2010? Should Washington regulate how banks and other financial institutions behave and pay their executives? How should the country pay for retirement supplements and health-care obligations undertaken when the country was richer and younger, now that it’s poorer and older? Are central banks such as the Federal Reserve redoubts of tyranny or tools to tame, or spur, the economy? Are taxes the price of civilization or a threat to freedom?

This will be an election where every vote counts -- and where every decision not to vote also counts.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.