Sci-Fi PAC

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Today while clicking around the Web I ran into a “restore our future” ad for Mitt Romney. Restore Our Future is, in fact, a SuperPAC organized by a bunch of rich guys connected to Romney.

I just want to know what lamebrain came up with the title “restore our future.” It is illogical. “The future” cannot, in fact, be restored, because it hasn’t happened yet. The only way “restore our future” makes sense is in science fiction.

Of course, what it wants to mean is that the future is supposed to be a certain way, and “we” must put things right now so that “we” can have the future “we” are supposed to have. But (1) who is “we”? and (2) only a fool thinks that way. And how interesting is it that they Would come up with a slogan that uses the word “future” but is really about the past? Because you can’t “restore” anything that hasn’t already been.

Quickie Quiz! What Do the Foreign Policies of Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton Have in Common?

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Damn if I know, but whatever it is, it’s what Mittens wants to go back to.

The Romney campaign cast Obama as an outlier president who failed to continue a bipartisan tradition of a strong military and leadership in the world. Several times on the call, his advisers described Romney as following a tradition that included Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton while President Obama’s approach, they said, was similar to Jimmy Carter’s. Romney’s approach is “a restoration of a strategy that served us well for over 70 years” and will renew a “bipartisan vision” of foreign policy, Wong said. “[Obama’s] foreign policy is marked by passivity, by delay and by indecision.”

I question whether there was any one “strategy” that “served us well for over 70 years.” You’ve got to be completely ignorant of global history to even think such a thing. And the national security challenges of today are utterly different from what they were in the post World War II era, and these new challenges demand new approaches both diplomatically and militarily. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy that might have worked in 1949 or 1962 and would still work in 2012. In particular, whatever happened to “9/11 changed everything”?

Again, Romney speaks of the military as if we need to be prepared to land on Normandy beach and advance to Berlin. But that sort of declared war between nations is unlikely to ever be fought again, or at least in our lifetimes.

Conservatives of the 1950s must be rolling over in their graves over praise of Truman who, after all, “lost China” and failed to win the Korean War. And Truman was the guy who said “I like Stalin.” Truman changed his mind later, but still …

Kennedy, Bay of Pigs? That was a bonehead move, although today people mostly remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Historians are still arguing about how much Kennedy should be blamed for Vietnam.

Reagan’s incoherent Lebanon misadventure cost the lives of 241 servicemen, mostly Marines, in one terrorist attack. So Reagan withdrew and consoled himself by invading Grenada. If Reagan had been a Democrat, the Right would have put him in the Weenie Museum next to Carter. And Iran Contra? Really, Jimmy Carter never did anything that weird.

And conservatives had nothing good to say about Clinton’s foreign policies while he was in office. I’d agree that foreign policy wasn’t President Clinton’s strong suit, although he got better as he went along. And, of course, the Bush II administration (unfairly) blamed Clinton for 9/11. How soon they forget.

Even a fellow from the American Enterprise Institute understands that Romney has to do more than pretend to be Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Romney needs to persuade people that he’s not simply a George W. Bush retread, eager to go to war in Syria and Iran and answer all the mail with an F-16.”

Mitt will be speaking today at the Virginia Military Institute:

In a speech on Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, Mr. Romney will declare that “hope is not a strategy” for dealing with the rise of Islamist governments in the Middle East or an Iran racing toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon, according to excerpts released by his campaign.

The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.”

But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described “realists” who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will.

In other words, Romney is a bit fuzzy about the details

Each group is vying to shape Mr. Romney’s views, usually through policy papers that many of the advisers wonder if he is reading. Indeed, in a campaign that has been so intensely focused on economic issues, some of these advisers, in interviews over the past two weeks in which most insisted on anonymity, say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.

Truly, as in all things that don’t involve leverage and tax shelters, Mitt cannot make up his mind.

Indeed, while the theme Mr. Romney plans to hit the hardest in his speech at V.M.I. — that the Obama era has been one marked by “weakness” and the abandonment of allies — has political appeal, the specific descriptions of what Mr. Romney would do, on issues like drawing red lines for Iran’s nuclear program and threatening to cut off military aid to difficult allies like Pakistan or Egypt if they veer away from American interests, sound at times quite close to Mr. Obama’s approach.

And the speech appears to glide past positions Mr. Romney himself took more than a year ago, when he voiced opposition to expanding the intervention in Libya to hunt down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with what he termed insufficient resources. He called it “mission creep and mission muddle,” though within months Mr. Qaddafi was gone. And last spring, Mr. Romney was caught on tape telling donors he believed there was “just no way” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could work.

You’ll like this part:

Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is the daughter of Mr. Bush’s vice president, has begun to join a weekly conference call that sporadically includes Dan Senor, who served as spokesman for the American occupation government in Iraq. Since the Republican National Convention, Mr. Senor has been assigned to the staff of Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, who in recent weeks has made Mr. Obama’s foreign policy a particular target.

Please, people, this man must not become President. Must. not. become. President. A Romney administration would be a global catastrophe.

What the Fetus People Don’t Want You to Know About Abortion and Contraception

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Here’s a really good video on abortion worldwide from Guttmacher:

This video makes a couple of points I’ve made here a few times.

One, criminalizing abortion doesn’t stop it; where abortion is illegal, it just goes underground. In fact, abortion is mostly illegal in the parts of the world with the highest rates of abortion, and mostly legal where the abortion rate is lowest. What really makes a difference in abortion rate is not criminalization of abortion, but use of contraceptives.

Two, globally, almost all of the women who die from complications of abortion got their abortions where they were illegal. Restricting abortion to “protect” women’s health is like restricting soap to protect cleanliness.

And then there is this:

In a study to be published in the December issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, researchers “recruited more than 9,250 women ages fourteen to forty-five from St. Louis city and county for the five-year project” and educated them on different types of birth control. Seventy-five percent of the women chose implantable methods.

Five years later, the women included in the study had had nearly five times fewer abortions than the national average would have predicted, and and the rate of teenage pregnancies fell by an astounding 82%.

If Republicans get out of the way of public health and allow free contraception to be implemented nationwide, researchers concluded free birth control could prevent over a million unplanned pregnancies and over 800,000 abortions a year.

(The pro-reproduction rights people rarely have used this well documented fact as a counter-argument to criminalizing abortion, and some of them argue that promising to reduce abortion through wider contraception use amounts to admitting that abortion is “bad,” so they won’t do it. Needless to say — I think that’s stupid.)

Mitt Can’t Win

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I agree with Greg Sargent that the job truther hysteria hurts Mittens more than it helps him. Also the Big Bird controversy continues to dominate most of the post-debate news. See also Don’t Mess With Big Bird.

Steve Benen’ Friday report on Mitt’s Mendacity runs to an epic 50 items. I’m sure it could have run longer, but poor Benen needed a rest.

Since I hardly ever watch CNN, I missed this —

Interesting analysis of Mitt’s fabulous wealth. Given when and how Mitt made his fortunate he actually ought to be worth a great deal more, the article says. Does he have another several million socked away somewhere that no one can find?

Update: Who is to blame for unemployment?

In the global economy, we accept a brand of capitalism that disconnects corporate leaders from the employees affected by their decisions. This geographic, civic and economic separation is what many unemployed people blame for their joblessness. …

… Badman, like most of the unemployed I met, knew that workers overseas did not steal his job. He blamed his unemployment on people “at corporate” he couldn’t name who, on the day after he was laid off, met with his former subordinates to ask what he did every day. Executives were so disconnected that they no longer knew what they had paid Badman to do. …

… Jobless Americans are Democrats and Republicans. Whatever their affiliation, many blame our democracy for not confronting the malfunctions of capitalism. Waiting for corporate leadership to reconnect with the demoralized American workforce is not an option.

“Corporate’s not going to listen,” Badman told me just down the street from the shuttered Vise-Grip plant in DeWitt. “They wouldn’t listen to us. But who are we? Who was I? We weren’t anybody.”

Interesting.

Shooting the Bird

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This morning I’m feeling a bit better, because I’m reading that the single most talked-about moment of Wednesday’s debate was Mitt threatening to kill Big Bird. God bless America.

See also the photograph of the President in Wisconsin, taken yesterday.

See also Charles Pierce on the new jobs figures.

As Nate says, it’s too soon to see a response to the debates in the polls. However, I think that unless there is a substantial shift in the polls, Mitt might find himself worse off than before. The word before the debate was that Mittens had to be more human and likable, and I don’t think he did that.

Yesterday the Obama campaign came out with this —

The Roller Coaster

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I’ve been remembering how exhausting election years always are. I could never survive being an actual candidate; just watching from the sidelines wears me out.

My memories of presidential debates do go back to Kennedy-Nixon, although I don’t remember that debate itself so much as I remember my father glumly predicting that Kennedy would win the election. Dad was a loyal Republican who died in 1999, and the last time I saw him he told me he was glad he wouldn’t be around for the 2000 election. Politics upset him so. Given the Florida 2000 debacle and 9/11, it may have been for the best he was gone.

There wasn’t another debate until 1976, when Ford and Carter debated. When Ford said “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” I remembered thinking, holy crow, he just lost the election. And he did. But the thing with that election is that the two candidates were so much alike people were reduced to flipping coins, and one good gaffe stood out sharply. It gave people something to choose by other than heads or tails.

People remember that the Reagan-Carter 2000 election was close until the debate just before the election, and then it was a blowout for Reagan. Recently I’ve read in several places that the “internal” polls already had Reagan ahead before the debates. Nate Silver’s chart shows that Reagan actually got only a 2.8 percent net polling gain, but that was enough. However, as I said, that debate was right before the election, so Reagan’s post-debate bounce peaked on election day.

At the Los Angeles Times, James Rainey reminds us that John Kerry really did mop the floor with George W. Bush in their first debate in 2004, and see how it turned the election around? Oh, wait …

In the debates since 1976, what people seem to remember most were gaffes and “zingers,” like “there you go again.” What gaffes and/or zingers do you remember from last night? I can’t think of one. This may explain the President’s caution — he was determined to not give Mitt’s people something they could blow up and use as a club to beat him with. And I honestly don’t think he gave them that.

On the other hand, Mitt’s arguments were so riddled with lies and contradictions that it should give the Obama campaign plenty of fuel for several good campaign ads. Unfortunately, the ads will consist of bringing up the points the President should have, but didn’t. And the media shouldn’t let Romney win the debate on well-told lies, but they probably will.

A big part of the problem with last night’s debate was Jim Lehrer. He was not there. Usually there is a panel of questioners who challenge the candidates, and Lehrer just sat there like a giant marshmallow. I trust the rest of the debates will be different. This one will just have to be water under the bridge.

I expect the race will tighten up in the next few days, and a few states that were solid blue yesterday may turn light blue or even pink. If only for my own sanity I would prefer that Obama just get way out in front and stay there. We won’t know for sure how much the debates “moved the needle” until early next week. And mistermix thinks Romney screwed himself badly on the Medicare question. So, we’ll see.

Update: First post-debate Obama video. What do you think?

Debate Live Blog

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Join us here for group snarking of the first presidential debate. I’m making no predictions. The expectations game being what it is, if Romney manages to speak in complete sentences and not drool, at least some pundits will call it a win. And President Obama is not as strong a debater as he is a speaker. So fingers crossed. But it may be that nothing that will happen tonight will make any difference …

* While we’re waiting, what questions would you ask? I want someone to pin Mittens down on what tax “loopholes” he would cut.

* Here we go. Interesting that they’re the same height. Oh, cool, Mittens has a red tie and the President has a blue tie.

* Republicans did not have a plan. They had a stack of paper.

JOBS

POTUS: Worst financial collapse since the Great Depression. Things are better, but we need to do more.

* Economic patriotism.

MITTENS: Mittens is wearing his empathy face. Mittens is repeating his five-point economic plan that doesn’t say shit.

*Back to POTUS. Both candidates say that improving education is important to economy. POTUS is explaining what he would do.

*POTUS is talking about tax code.

*Now Romney is lying about his tax plans. He hasn’t proposed tax cuts for upper income?

*OK, on Mitt’s web page he says he is proposing a 20 percent across-the-board tax cuts on marginal tax rates. Now he’s saying he is not going to cut taxes for the wealthy? When did he change his mind?

*Romney is now saying he is not going to reduce the tax share for high income individuals. This is a complete flip for what he has been saying all along. See Think Progress.

*So, basically, Mitt’s debate strategy is to lie his ass off about what he has promised in the past.

* Richard Adams: “So far from Mitt Romney there’s been more waffle than zinger. But when you have a “no details tax plan” that’s what happens I guess.”

DEBT

* Mittens: Debt is immoral.

* Mittens says that raising taxes slows economic growth. Not during the Clinton Administration.

* Mittens plans to grow jobs by laying off government employees.

Some facts on Romney’s proposals.

Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.
Bill Clinton balanced the budget by raising taxes.

POTUS, SAY THAT!

* Frankly, someone watching this without a pretty solid background in current events might feel Mittens is winning. Mittens is lying his ass off, but if you didn’t know that, he might seem persuasive. What do you think?

* Oh, Medicare Advantage is doing fine, Mittens. People aren’t about to lose it.

* Yep, Mittens is smirking.

* The simple fact is that the private sector insurance has increased faster than Medicare.

FINANCIAL SECTOR

* Mittens is talking about Dodd Frank, POTUS looks very happy.

HEALTH CARE

WTF is Mittens talking about Obamacare insurance costing more? That doesn’t even make sense.

DEATH PANELS DEATH PANELS DEATH PANELS

There is no board that will tell people what treatment they will have.

* Mittens promises goodies without saying how they will be paid for.

* Mittens won’t tell us how he could keep his promises because he wants to wait until he hears from Congress.

* Isn’t this debate going over schedule?

ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

Mission of the federal government.

POTUS: Keep people safe. Government has the capacity to open opportunity and create frameworks where people can succeed.

Willard: FREEDOM! He wants people to have the freedom to be taken care of by charity. Wow.

Well, I have to say Willard isn’t coming across as warm and human. He’s coming across as Willard.

POTUS: Making college affordable. Student loan crisis. Cut out the middleman.

Well, I’m going to have to say that people are probably going to say Mitt came out ahead, and he’s likely to get a bump, but I don’t see that Mitt is getting a knockout punch, and that’s what he needed.

* It’s also the case that the fact-checkers are going to have a field day with a lot of what Mitt says.

I missed this, but Moveon is saying that Mitt called the President “bro.”

* Well, the Guardian liveblog and my Facebook friends are trashing Mittens right and left. Maybe it’s a draw.

* Mitt is not being likeable, I have to say. He’s kind of harsh.

OK, it’s over. I’m watching MSNBC because I want Rachel Maddow to reassure me. But if you’re watching something else let us know what is being said.

* Steve Schmidt is saying this was a great night for Mitt Romney, and I don’t doubt Republicans really liked Mitt’s performance. But the question is, will this move the needle? Is this going to make much difference?

Chris Matthews is furious at the President for letting Romney dominate the debate. Where was Obama tonight? he says.

One more thing — people are griping that the President wasn’t more aggressive. I’m not sure that would have worked for him, because if he comes across as angry, he loses. I blame Jim Lehrer for being much too passive. We needed questioners to keep the format in control, and Jim Lehrer just plain failed. That worked in Romney’s favor.

Well, I’m tired and need to go to bed, but do keep commenting.

Party Tonight!

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The virtual debate party begins here tonight at 8:30 eastern time, for the pre-debate warmup. BYOB. I’m taking suggestions for drinking games.

There are a number of articles out now that claim debates make no difference to elections, but Nate Silver’s analysis says that they often help the challenger. However, it could be argued that the post-debate spin was what made the difference, not the debate itself. For example, the numbers show that the Clinton-Dole debates in 1996 helped Dole just a little, and there’s no way. Dole was awful. I was embarrassed for him.

On the other hand, Nate’s numbers say that if the election were held today, Mitt’s chance of winning would be 2.7 percent. heh.

I’m not too worried about the spin. Why? Because righties are so out to lunch they couldn’t spin a dreidel on a turntable on a carousel. Right now they think they have a BOMBSHELL video of President Obama in 2007 telling an audience of black ministers that the federal government did not do enough to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Seriously. That’s their idea of a controversy. I guess we’re supposed to remember that Brownie did a heck of a job.

Righties say Obama’s remarks were racist because he ties the not-rebuilding of New Orleans to racial discrimination. Um, yeah, that was pretty obvious. Although I suppose it could be argued that it wasn’t so much racist as an attempt to finesse Katrina for political gain by making a Democratic governor look bad. And that the federal dollars eventually offered to New Orleans mostly went into the pockets of contractors with ties to the Republican Party and were not spent on, you know, rebuilding. And that was just good old-fashioned corruption. But it’s still not likely the Bushies would have played games like that if the neighborhoods that were destroyed were mostly white. I think anyone but a white racist can see that.

See also “Breaking: Obama Is Black” and “Right-wing Racial Panic.”

I Am (Blue-Collar White) Woman, Hear Me Roar

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I’m reading that a big part of President Obama’s lead in battleground states is coming from blue-collar white women. This is a group that usually leans Republican, so demographic-watchers are taking notice.

The real wonder, to me, is why this group ever preferred Republicans. Much credit is being given to the effectiveness of President Obama’s ad campaign, in particular the ones playing up Romney’s “47 percent” remark. And there’s probably something to that. Low-income white women are, I suspect, less likely than the menfolk to kid themselves that Romney wasn’t talking about them.

Bottom line: Romney is a Suit. He is a pure and distilled Suit. He has Suitness coming out of his pores; everything about him just plain screams Suit. And low-income women generally learn from experience that nothing good ever comes from Suits.

Further, the Democrats finally have clearly distinguished themselves as being pro-legal abortion, pro-Planned Parenthood, and pro-contraception benefits, while Republicans take the opposite position. Low-income women often live one pregnancy away from absolute ruin.

And, um, equal pay for equal work, anybody?

And blue collar women are most often in jobs that don’t pay health benefits, and getting health care for themselves and their children is a constant worry. They don’t see government programs as “dependency” but survival. They may not understand how “Obamacare” is going to work, and they may be afraid of it or skeptical it’s going to change much. But neither do they have much incentive to want to preserve the status quo. And Republicans look like a party of, by, and for Suits who want to preserve the status quo for the benefit of Suits.

And what else are the Republicans offering? Ralph Reed being crazy.