Category Archives: Mittens

Stinky and the Bain

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Latest bobblehead chatter is that his association with Romney will doom Paul Ryan’s future political career. So Ryan is cutting himself loose from the Romney game plan and has unleashed (everybody’s favorite word these days) his inner wonk by … giving a Powerpoint presentation?

I’m with Dave Weigel — “wonk” is being defined down for Ryan’s benefit. Real wonks don’t do Powerpoint, and if they do, they don’t limit themselves to four bleeping slides.

Ryan also is reported to be saying snarky things about Romney within earshot of reporters on his campaign bus. I understand not everyone is buying that, though.

See Paul Krugman, “Delusions of Wonkhood” and “Death by Powerpoint, Continued.”

GOP Struggles with Math

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Yesterday Politico trotted out a polling analysis that says Romney is winning among middle-class families. They don’t define what they mean by “middle class,” but I notice the analysis makes a careful distinction between middle-class voters and middle-class families. Apparently Romney is losing with middle-class voters but winning with middle-class families; like the kids and dog count, I suppose. Or maybe they define “families” as “related white people who live together in the South somewhere.” The whole thing strikes me as an exercise in reassuring themselves they aren’t really losing.

Righties even have adopted what they are calling “unskewed” polling outcomes that show Romney winning handily. On the other hand, Sam Wang of Princeton Election Consortium is giving President Obama a 90 percent win probability. Nate Silver continues to give the President a comfortable lead in probable electoral votes.

Meanwhile, a small army of conservative number-crunchers are striving mightily to figure out a way to make Mitt Romney’s tax-and-deficit promises mathematically possible. So far, they haven’t been able to do it. See also “Checking Rove’s Math.”

Josh Marshall writes about why the GOP can’t, or won’t, adapt.

As recently as a couple weeks ago, the top generals in the Romney camp were stuck on the idea that Obama cannot win with unemployment this high. Can’t. And if evidence suggests otherwise, just give it time.

I’m reminded of this column which Byron York wrote on September 10th …

Mitt Romney and his top aides are running an essentially faith-based campaign. Whatever the polls say at the moment, whatever the pundits say, whatever some nervous Republicans say, Team Romney simply does not believe President Obama can win re-election in today’s terrible economy. The president may appear to be defying gravity now, but he can’t keep it up through Nov. 6.

Whether Romney could have done anything else if his team thought Plan A might not pan out I don’t know. But I think York was on to something here. Maybe not quite arrogance but a deep faith in an unproven hypothesis — enabled by a contemptuous disrespect for their opponent which blinded them to some of his assets as a candidate.

Perhaps they are blinded by his “blah”-ness.

Seriously, I’ve been saying for years that one symptom of whatever cognitive dysfunction is common to righties is a desperate need to believe that everyone but a small fringe of crazy liberals sees the world the way they do. You see something similar in white supremacists, who devoutly believe all other white people are white supremacists also but that a majority won’t admit it because it’s not “PC.” A rightie can no more admit that wingnuttery is not embraced by almost all Americans than the Pope could convert to Sikhism. That’s why, when they lose elections, the only possible (to them) reason must be voter fraud, or else voters were deceived by the Lamestream Media. So, it’s not surprising they simply cannot accept what is happening now in the campaigns.

The Right: You Latino People Are Too Emotional

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At the American Enterprise Institute blog and Daily Caller, they are struggling to explain why Latinos support Bush Obama over Romney, and the conclusion is that it’s all about emotions. “Hispanics have an emotional connection to Obama, and an emotional disconnect with the GOP,” said the AEI blogger.

According to these “analysts,” Latinos should be deserting Obama and turning to Romney because the economy remains sluggish and because he failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act. It’s like Latinos are not supposed to notice that the last two objectives were blocked by Republicans. They’re not supposed to notice that Romney has said he would veto the DREAM Act and expects millions of immigrants to “self-deport.”

No; if Latinos prefer Obama over Romney, they’re just being “emotional.”

Ideological Inbreeding

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Via Steve M, a fascinating analysis by Noah Millman at The American Conservative.

I have only become more convinced that what has changed the dynamics of this election has been a fundamental reevaluation not merely – or even primarily – of the two candidates, but of the two parties. This election is becoming nationalized, and it is becoming nationalized in the context of an across-the-board swing in the direction of the Democrats.

The reason, I think, is a simple one. The Republicans Party – not just the Romney campaign, but the party as a whole – is running on nothing. They are running on the presumption that the country has already rejected the Democrats, and that therefore it is their turn. They are behaving as if choosing Democratic governance was some kind of “experiment” that didn’t work out, and now the American people will, of course, come back to their natural home.

By contrast, the Democrats actually made a case for their party. They explained what their party has done, and why they should be able to set the national agenda. They defended their foreign policy, their economic policy, and their social policy in strong, unapologetic terms.

Millman points out that the polls haven’t just been moving in favor of Obama; in the swing states they’ve been moving in favor of Democrats in down ticket races as well. There’s still time for that to change before the election, of course, but I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the election campaigns right now.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote,

… GOP obsession with “vetting” Barack Obama, and with a variety of ill-fated attack lines, comes from two things: the divergence of incentives between the Romney campaign and what my brother calls the “movement conservative marketplace”; and, the closed information loop that makes it difficult for insiders to have any sense of how outsiders would see these attack lines.

Bernstein suggests the mighty media infrastructure may have turned into a liability for righties, because it’s too easy to gin up some phony controversy that explodes on Fox News and Politico and Buzzfeed, and which gets the rightie bloggers all fired up, but which is simply meaningless to the general electorate. The recent outrage that there’s a several-year-old video of Barack Obama using the word “redistribution” is an example. That was supposed to counter Romney’s “47 percent” remark? On what planet?

A lot of the current generation of Republican politicians suffer from ideological inbreeding, IMO. They have absolutely no idea what anyone outside the echo chamber thinks. And the only political skill many of these clowns possess is being a loyal echo. A lot of them don’t seem to understand what government is for, and I doubt they could write sensible policy legislation if you let them copy it off a blackboard.

New Shoe Drops: Ryan Disses Social Security, Medicare

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This is on the website of America: The National Catholic Weekly. Back in 2005 Paul Ryan made a speech to the Atlas Society in which he praised Ayn Rand and admitted that he wanted to target Social Security and Medicare to be privatized to reduce government dependency.

This is the America blogger, Vincent Miller:

It is impossible to summarize these statements without sounding like a breathless conspiracy theorist. Here’s what Ryan says. Don’t trust my bullets. Read the transcript. Don’t trust my transcript, listen to the audio on the Atlas Society site.

  • Ryan describes Social Security and Medicare as “collectivist” and “socialistic.”
  • Ryan’s strategic plan: privatize Social Security and Medicare in order to convert people from “collectivism” to believers in a “capitalistic individualistic” philosophy. So that there will be “more people on our team” who “won’t listen to” Democrats.
  • Ryan’s acceptance of Pinochet’s Secretary of Social Security José Piñera’s similar program of Social Security privatization as a “moral revolution” that made Marxists into capitalists who started to read the Chilean equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. Ryan is overheard, “Yeah” “That’s right.”

For Ryan “defined benefit” programs such as Social Security and Medicare are problems in themselves. This isn’t something he saves for gatherings of the Ayn Rand Society, such concerns about “dependency” are scattered throughout his Path to Prosperity—again hidden in plain sight. This transcript doesn’t so much reveal a secret, as highlight a clear theme in his policy rationale that is always present, but in more public settings subordinated to his prophecies of fiscal apocalypse. Thus, it is no surprise his budget cuts the safety net and radically reshapes Medicare first and addresses the deficit later.

For the audio file, go to this page, scroll down to the bottom of the post, and click on the little audio icon.

Vincent Miller has transcribed parts of the 2005 speech that were not transcribed before. Ryan really is calling Medicare and Social Security “collectivist” and “socialist,” and he is calling for complete privatization of both.

So if there were any Social Security/Medicare recipients out there who didn’t believe the 47 percent included them, this should clear things up.

Not a Gaffe

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This morning the Republican Party, and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, found itself in a very deep hole. And it appears they’re going to keep digging for a while. I say this because the Right doesn’t seem to grasp why what Mitt said on the “parasite” video is so outrageous.

For example, Daniel Foster writes at NRO:

I don’t think there is any way to spin the release of this video as a positive for Romney, but I do think — and I said as much on Twitter — that now that it has happened, Romney’s only play is to turn into the approaching torpedoes at flank speed, Marko Ramius style.

In other words, the more fully Romney owns these comments the less the press can report them as a “gaffe.” Romney is now in a position that he has to bring the fight to Obama on the entitlement state. He can’t coast on poor economic indicators. Which, I think, is to the good, since the polls are showing that that is not a guaranteed winner, anyway.

So Mr. Foster worries that the press will report Romney’s parasite rant as a “gaffe”? He thinks that’s the worst that can happen?

A “gaffe” is meeting with Ed Miliband and calling him “Mr. Leader.” In the video, we hear Romney going on and on about nearly half of the citizens of the United States being parasites who are beneath his concern. And he was speaking clearly, articulately, and with great conviction. That was no “gaffe.”

So often when speaking in public Mitt adopts the expression and tone of a nervous man trying to placate a snarling dog, whereas in the video he sounds both relaxed and passionate. One suspects this is a speech Mittens has made many times before, to close friends and family, and that he believes every word.

(BTW, Foster suggested that Romney explain his remarks this way —

I said they probably wouldn’t vote for me. I never said I didn’t want to help them. I never said I wouldn’t do everything I could as president to make sure that 1 in 7 of them are not on foodstamps, to get jobs for the 8 percent who can’t find them and the countless more who’ve given up.

However, the thrust of Romney’s economic argument these days is that government cannot get people jobs; that government is supposed to get out of the way so that “freedom” can grow the economy. Perhaps this theory needs more work.)

See the abbreviated pundit round-up at Daily Kos for a nice sampling of the reaction to Mitt’s hitting the fan. Even Mark Halperin and David Brooks are disgusted.

But I want to go on to a couple of other points. First, please do read “The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney” by Tim Dickinson, if you haven’t already. This happened in 1995 —

The FDIC agreed to accept nearly $5 million in cash to retire $15 million in Bain’s debt – an immediate government bailout of $10 million. All told, the FDIC estimated it would recoup just $14 million of the $30 million that Romney’s firm owed the government.

Read the article for the details. I’m saying that if a low-income disabled veteran receiving VA benefits is a “parasite” in Mitt’s book, then by comparison Mittens must be a world-devouring monster. Especially if you add the money Mitt drained out of the federal government to run his Olympics — which helped Mitt professionally if not financially — I bet Mitt has benefited from more federal “hand out” dollars in his life than all the citizens in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, combined. Easily.

Second, if the Right really wants to wade into the “entitlement” argument, I say let ’em. Let them be clear that they see Social Security and Medicare recipients as “parasites.” Let them be clear that the child born with birth defects benefiting from SCHIP, the disabled veteran in the VA hospital, the 6 million elderly whose nursing home bills are paid by Medicaid, are “parasites.”

C’mon, righties, that’s how you think. Come out and say it. Have the courage of your convictions. The fact is, a big chunk of the people who vote for Republicans are parasites in the eyes of Republican politicians, and it’s high time they realized that’s what you think they are, wouldn’t you say?

Update: Michael Walsh at NRO, “Mitt’s Gettysburg Moment.” Unreal.