Yes, It Matters Who Wins
I see that the usual bilge about how it doesn’t matter whether Romney or Obama wins in November has already started. You’d think after the 2000 election people might have shut up, but no.
Looking back, the only presidential election in my lifetime in which the outcome possibly wouldn’t have made much difference in domestic or foreign policy was 1976, Ford vs. Carter. In those days, a relatively progressive Republican and a relatively conservative Democrat were nearly indistinguishable.
Of course, in hindsight, one could argue that Ford’s loss helped set the stage for Reagan’s win in 1980. The choices we make in each election starts the nation on a new trajectory, and only a fool thinks he knows where any trajectory will go.
Anyway — part of the problem is that Mr. Etch-a-Sketch truly is a blank slate. His record in Massachusetts tells us nothing about what he might do as President. The fact that he appears to be relatively sane and intelligent compared to the clowns he has been running against should not reassure anyone. Especially if there are Republican majorities in the House and Senate, which Everyone Says is going to be the case, my best guess is that he’ll stand aside and let them do whatever they want. My other best guess is that he will continue to cater to the base that put him in office. That prospect should terrify the socks off any sensible person.
Here’s something else that ought to scare the stuffing out of everyone:
Mitt Romney wants the United States to get much tougher with Iran and to end what a top adviser calls President Barack Obama’s “Mother, may I?” consensus-seeking foreign policy.
With the presidential nomination all but locked up, an examination of Romney’s foreign policy pronouncements and the team advising him on those issues indicates Americans and the world might expect a Republican campaign that reprises the hawkish and often unilateral foreign policy prescriptions that guided Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
“The world is better off when the United States takes the lead. We should not be playing ‘Mother, may I?’ about sanctions on Iran and relations with China and Russia,” said Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser. He has advised presidents beginning with Reagan, held many diplomatic posts in past Republican administrations and was Bush’s special envoy to Sudan.
I’m saying Romney is George W. Bush without the Texas accent, people. You elect him, you’ll get tax cuts for the rich up the wazoo, huge cuts in benefit programs, and a return to foreign policy by the Marlboro Man. Of course, I realize you can find people on the Left who whine that Obama is no better than Bush. These people are asshats.
And he’ll have a Republican majority in the House and Senate, many of whom will be pushing him further Right.
President Obama had a bare majority in his first two years, but many of them were Blue Dogs who voted with the Republicans on critical issues. Congress in effect pulled him further Right than he probably wanted to go. And the twits of the world throw up their hands and say, well, there’s no real difference which one we elect.
Which is what they said about Bush v. Gore. They don’t learn.
So, we pronouncements like “I think that if President Obama had really wanted to pass a cap-and-trade plan he would have done so in the last term.” With this Congress? Are so many people really that stupid?
Jonathan Bernstein has a pretty good counter argument.
Going to Schuler’s list: Yes, both Obama and McCain will be interventionist. But if one would invade Iran and the other wouldn’t — well, that’s a massive difference, even if both would embark on Libya-type adventures. There’s a good chance that Guantanamo stays open regardless of who is elected, but Romney’s supporters include many who support reinstituting torture; that’s extremely unlikely to be U.S. policy if Obama is reelected. Again, I’d call that a massive difference. On taxes, too, one candidate supports modest increases in tax rates for upper-level taxpayers, while the other favors large tax cuts from current levels; if either party wins a landslide, it’s likely that those positions would be enacted. No, it would not be a return to 1990s levels (nor, most likely, would it get taxes quite to where Ron Paul might want them), but again, there’s quite a bit of money for both individuals and the U.S. Treasury on the line.
Right now I’d like to take names of anyone who thinks Romney would be no worse than Obama, so theirs can be the first boots on the ground when President Romney orders an invasion.
The Next Non-Issue
Atrios said something this morning —
What we have to look forward to over the next several months is the following scenario repeated over and over again: somebody says something dumb, it gets elevated into a pseudoscandal, cable news freaks out, there are calls for various people to denounce whatever or whoever, and then eventually the whole thing calms down until the next time, likely because somebody was eaten by a shark somewhere.
So I see that Ted Nugent is threatening to shoot members of the Obama Administration if the President is re-elected. Or else he’s threatening to shoot himself; it’s a bit hard to tell. I’ll let the Secret Service sort that out.
So already people are calling on Mitt Romney to denounce Ted Nugent. just as there have been calls for President Obama to denounce Hilary Rosen and everyone else in North America who has ever said anything that upset the Right.
And y’know what? I don’t bleeping care if Mittens denounced Ted Nugent. A politician should be held responsible for many things; what some brain-damaged gasbag says is not among them, unless the gasbag is on his staff. We’ve got more important stuff to be arguing about.
Wanker of the decade is Tom Friedman, btw.
Dignity of Work for Thee, but Not for Me
I got a kick out of this segment from last night’s Maddow show, hosted by Chris Hayes.
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Throughout human history the upper classes have always believed the lower classes have to be forced to work. That’s what’s really screaming out at me in Hayes’s commentary. It’s the attitude coming from upper class people who see themselves as inherently virtuous, just because, looking down paternally on the less fortunate and thinking you will prove your worth to me by working your ass off for me.
CNN Poll: No Change in Gender Gap
The survey indicates women voters back Obama over Romney by 16 points (55%-39%), virtually unchanged from an 18-point advantage among women for the president in CNN polling last month.
The poll was conducted two days after Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen created a controversy by saying that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.”
“That remark may have little long-term effect on women voters,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “By a two-to-one margin, the women surveyed saw President Obama as more in touch with the problems facing American women today.”
We won’t know for sure until some more polls come in, but I will be honestly surprised if there is any significant change in President Obama’s approval ratings among women because of Mrs. Romney’s self-centered hissy fit about how hard she works.
National Guard-Gate Revisited
A Texas Monthly article by Joe Hagan revisits the controversy over the gaps in George W. Bush’s National Guard service and the damage done to Dan Rather by the 60 Minutes story about it.
(Note: It’s a long story, and if you want to read it you’d better print it out now, because I understand that it will go behind a firewall in a couple of days. )
It’s still mostly a story about missing documentation. It does establish that the head of the Texas Air National Guard, Brigadier General James Rose, did make spaces in the Guard for both G.W. Bush and the son of Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen. It also establishes that Bush was allowed to drop out of flying in 1972. Ten other pilots were allowed to drop out that same year, but the rest of them were much older and had had more than two decades of experience. Bush had been flying for two years.
As the story says, this wasn’t exactly illegal. It just shows that the Texas National Guard was a “loosely regulated fiefdom,” and Gen. Rose could dispense favors as he wished.
There is still no evidence that Bush reported for duty in Alabama when he said he did. The existing records say he blew off two drills for certain. The article also says that for part of the time he was being paid for his duty in Alabama he actually was in Houston. More than that is kind of a blank. By all appearances he was allowed to skip out of the rest of his Guard duty. He says otherwise, but any documentation that might have cleared that up is mysteriously missing from his military record. Which is pretty much what we all knew back in 2004 when the 60 Minutes segment ran.
Of particular interest to me was this:
But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies. …
… In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.â€
… which is what I said at the time, and was mercilessly skewered for it. But, dammit, I had typed and typed and typed on those typewriters in the early 1970s, and there was nothing on those memos that couldn’t have come out of one of the better 1970s-era electric typewriters — proportional type, precise centering, superscripts, etc.
If course, since the memos Dan Rather and his staff had were photocopies, there is no way to prove they were authentic, which was why it was stupid on Rather’s part to use them as proof of anything. There was plenty of “story” without them, but with them the bogus type font issue ate up all the oxygen and became the story.
The Right basically was allowed to establish that the memos were phony mostly by screaming and stamping their feet real, real loud, and without the originals they couldn’t be proved wrong.
Hagan also says that at the time of the 60 Minutes broadcast the Associated Press had been pressing the Pentagon for some other documents that they believed would reveal the truth about the “lost year.” The AP actually asked CBS to wait on their story so as not to spook their sources. But CBS didn’t wait, and once the story became radioactive the AP dropped its investigation also.
By now any original documents that might show us something have been destroyed or rotted in a landfill somewhere, so unless Dubya himself confesses we’ll never know the whole story. Damn shame.
Righties Declare Victory in the War on Women
However, at the moment I don’t feel conquered. A bit tired, but not conquered.
Speaking of wars — history tells us that at the end of the first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Confederate General Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard telegraphed Richmond that he had won “a complete victory.” History also tells us that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman also assumed the Confederates had won. He sought out his commanding officer, General Ulysses S. Grant, to receive his orders for retreat.
Sherman found Grant hunkered under a tree, in the rain, smoking a cigar. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman said. And Grant, after another puff of the cigar, said, “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” There would be no retreat.
The next day Union troops routed the Confederates and won the day, and the battle. Beauregard’s premature assumption of victory haunted the rest of his military career. Although, truth be told, his association with the Confederacy ended up being a worse career move.
I always think of General Beauregard whenever people declare victory a bit prematurely. At the Village Voice, Roy Edroso describes rightbloggers taking virtual victory laps and even performing psychological post-mortems on the conquered Left.
[Rosen’s] comments are a symptom of an underlying intolerance for values that exist outside pockets of liberal majority,” claimed Right Speak. That is, they represent (deep breath) “the mindset that traditional, conservative culture is bad as it exists outside the two coasts and other liberal centers of thought, such as higher education, it is dangerous, because the more it is allowed to be considered as mainstream, the more acceptable it will seem to all when legislation is passed one step at a time that eliminates and erodes many of the values the rest of the country holds.”
“I feel the left is riddled with insecurity,” explained AJ Strata. “They are intimidated by the rich, the powerful (see our military), the successful (another form of rich), and the happy. They thrive on sustaining the moment they revolted from parental oppression (be it religion, sexual orientation, taste in clothes, whatever). Why they even consider having or raising kids is beyond me. Maybe it is more of that lashing out and trying to prove they were right when they went full anarchist to leave the nest.” Whoever would imagine there were enough such people to elect a President? America must be in a very grave state.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Mittens is calling Hilary Rosen’s remarks an “early birthday present.” So far, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Mittens have told us why Mrs. Mittens has been deprived of the “Dignity of Work.”
It may be a few days before we know if the “mommy war” flap put any dent in the gender gap working against Mittens, or if the rightbloggers are pulling a General Beauregard. But if things work out the way I suspect they will, I have some advice for them:
Mittens Is Going to Be Very Sorry
He probably thinks he has found the key for winning back women’s votes by piling on the old “mommy wars.” But then Chris Hayes found this, from January:
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So, according to Mittens, stay-at-home moms don’t understand the “dignity of work.” Chris Hayes continues,
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And Chris Hayes reminds us that for years we’ve heard that poor and single mothers must be pushed into the work force so that they aren’t lazy and dependent. But wealthier women actually enjoy tax benefits for staying home. If you want to see more of this morning’s program, see the Chris Hayes page.
Ryan Grim spells it out at Huffington Post. See also Alex Seitz-Wald at Think Progress
Most of us who had to work to support ourselves and our children had it up to here with the “mommy wars” years ago. Yes, raising kids is work, but raising kids while working full time is more work. A lot more work. Especially when you can’t afford housekeepers and cooks and nannies.
I think Mittens may be about to find out that the “mommy wars” aren’t the opportunity he thought they were. Let’s see what Mr. Etch-a-Sketch has to say about his welfare policies in the next few days.
The Republican War Against Women
The Wall Street Journal wants us to know that Republicans can win the War Against Women. Seriously. I like this headline so much I screen captured it before some dweeb at WSJ wakes up and realizes what it says —
Anyway, WSJ thinks Romney should let the world know how Democratic policies are hurting women:
Rarely noted in the “women’s” debate is that most of this country’s major institutions and laws were developed at a time of one-earner households. In 1950, only 12% of mothers with children under the age of six were in the labor force. That number is today more than 60%. Yet many women who now work are penalized by outdated policies that haven’t kept pace with these big shifts in American society.
Exhibit A is a progressive tax code and the penalty it imposes on earning marginal, or additional, income. Most married women are second earners. That means their income is added to that of their husband’s and thus often taxed at a high marginal rate. This “marriage penalty” has never fully been adjusted for in the tax code. A married woman working on an assembly line keeps less of her paycheck than the unwed man who does the same job. That’s real inequality in pay for women.
You won’t hear Democrats admitting this punitive tax burden—particularly when combined with child-care costs—is a reason many women can’t afford to work, even if they wish to.
I’ve never heard the “marriage tax” described this way, but let’s go on — in all my years I’ve never heard a woman complain that taxes are keeping her from pursing her career. Have you?
And now we come to it …
And the expiration of the Bush tax cuts would compound this problem. To the extent Mr. Romney is offering a flatter tax code, with lower marginal rates, he is offering millions of women greater choice and a shot at more economic freedom.
That goes beyond merely off the wall or out of touch; that’s downright depraved. Any woman wealthy enough to benefit from the bleeping Bush tax cuts has plenty of options to work or not to work as she pleases. And if she does work, it probably won’t be a the cash register of the local Piggly Wiggly for minimum wage.
Here’s a campaign issue I really do want Romney to run on:
Mr. Romney might note the damage done to women by antiquated but still operative labor law, such as a provision in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that requires hourly workers who put in more than 40 hours a week to get overtime.
Please, Mittens, add that to your speeches. Please.
While some women like overtime, a 1990s poll found that 81% said they’d rather pack more hours into fewer days and receive compensatory time off. The phrase for this is “flex time,” an invaluable option for many mothers attempting to juggle work and family. Not in this Democratic war.
“Flex time” and overtime pay are two different issues. In the real world, the only thing keeping many women hourly workers from being forced to work more than a 40-hour-week is the overtime pay requirement. Without it, they’d be in the same boat as many salaried workers, being expected to tack additional time onto the workday with no additional compensation, including time off. In all my years of working I had only one job that gave comp time, and that was when our business travels ate up a weekend. And I was on salary.
The idea behind “flex time” is not fewer hours, but the ability to start and end the workday at something other than 9 to 5, like maybe 8:30 to 4:30. Assuming one is working hourly, of course. For salaried workers that would be more like 8:30 to 7:00.
Government creates myriad roadblocks for women’s economic progress, but Republicans largely have failed to make that case. They’ve instead let themselves be dragged into the tired debate over “equal pay” and “women’s rights” and “gender equality.”
Oh yes, so tired.
Democrats love competing on these terms because it allows them to argue that the remedy always lies with more government, no matter the adverse consequences.
Instead, we should eliminate all employment and workplace regulations and live at the tender mercies of our employers? Oh, yes, run on that, Mittens. It’s the message the nation is waiting to hear.
It’s no accident that the first piece of legislation Mr. Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Purporting to snuff out wage discrimination, this is mostly a litigation bonanza for trial lawyers.
Yes, Mittens, run against Lilly Ledbetter. You know you want to. Lilly wants you to.
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Now, let’s go back to what I linked to in the last post. I’m just going to repeat this:
One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars†is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).
For all we hear about “family friendly†conservatives promoting traditional families to keep us from going the way of G-d-forsaken Europe, the reality is that the U.S. actually has a higher percentage of infants and toddlers in childcare (as opposed to home with mom) than all the OECD countries except Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (and we’re closer to Sweden than we are to the OECD average). That’s the direct result of policy choices we’ve made, including the total absence of paid parental leave (for which we stand alone among developed countries, in a small and shrinking field that includes Papau New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho). And even as the recession has increased the number of moms of very young children in the workforce, states have cut funding for child care and made it harder to get in other ways as well.
But, y’know, if we could just make the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent, everything will be right as rain. Yeah, campaign on that, Mittens.
Update: A Republican voter speaks —
It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.
The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.
Losers? This boy belongs under a bell jar in the Loser Museum.
GOP to Moms: Drop Dead
One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars†is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s. The Affordable Care Act included provisions designed to help stop this scary trend—not just by expanding health care access (many maternal deaths could be prevented with proper care)—but also through the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, created as part of ACA, which provides nurses and social workers to work with high-risk moms, starting before they give birth, to help them have healthy pregnancies and deliveries and support their babies’ health and development after birth.The program is modeled after programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership that have a strong track record of improving maternal and child outcomes, preventing abuse and neglect, increasing fathers’ involvement in their kids’ lives, improving kids’ school performance, reducing crime, and saving the taxpayers a boatload of money over the long term. But all that could go the way of the dodo, if ACA is struck down or repealed (and some of the right wing fear-mongering about this program must be seen to be believed).
For all we hear about “family friendly†conservatives promoting traditional families to keep us from going the way of G-d-forsaken Europe, the reality is that the U.S. actually has a higher percentage of infants and toddlers in childcare (as opposed to home with mom) than all the OECD countries except Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden (and we’re closer to Sweden than we are to the OECD average). That’s the direct result of policy choices we’ve made, including the total absence of paid parental leave (for which we stand alone among developed countries, in a small and shrinking field that includes Papau New Guinea, Swaziland, and Lesotho). And even as the recession has increased the number of moms of very young children in the workforce, states have cut funding for child care and made it harder to get in other ways as well.
Oh, but the Romney campaign has pro-mom bumper stickers!
And the Republican National Committee has pro-mom coffee mugs!
Seriously.