Monday, Apr 23, 2012 11:45 AM UTC
Everything you need to know about Willard Mitt Romney. An excerpt from Salon’s new e-book, «The Rude Guide to Mitt» VIDEOBy Alex Pareene
(Credit: Illustration by Benjamin Wheelock)
Mitt Romney is weird. When the Obama reelection campaign early in the cycle made the mistake of indicating that its strategy would be to imply that Mitt Romney is weird by repeatedly telling Politico that it planned on calling Mitt Romney weird, Romney’s camp countered by causing a brief and not particularly sincere media brouhaha over whether “weird” is code for “Mormon.” Plenty of Americans think Mormons are weird, yes, but in this case, the simple fact is Mitt Romney is weird, entirely apart from his religion.
He seems incapable of natural conversation and frequently uncomfortable in his own skin. He’s simultaneously dorkily earnest and ingratiatingly insincere. He suggests a brilliantly designed politician android with an operating system still clearly in beta. He once tied a dog to the roof of his car and drove for hundreds of miles without stopping and some years later thought that was an endearing story. All video of him attempting to interact with normal humans is cringe-inducing, as a cursory YouTube search quickly demonstrates. (Martin Luther King Day, Jacksonville, Fla., 2008: Mitt poses for a picture with some cheerful young parade attendees. As he squeezes in to the otherwise all-black group, he says, apropros of nothing, “Who let the dogs out? Woof, woof!”) He seems to have been told that “small talk” is mostly made up of cheerfully delivered non sequiturs.
Every good Romney profile has a “Romney says something bizarre” moment. In Sridhar Pappu’s 2005 profile for the Atlantic, Romney produced a commemorative plate featuring the likenesses of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, and announced: “Not only was Eisenhower one of my favorite presidents; when we became grandparents, you get to choose what the kids will call you. Some call you Papa. I chose Ike. I’m Ike, and Ann is Mamie.”
Leaving aside that Eisenhower worship is not particularly widespread in the modern GOP (he failed to kill the New Deal programs and didn’t particularly love Israel), it is not “a thing” that you can make your grandchildren call you by the name of a random dead president. There are a wide variety of names for grandparents based on family traditions and cultures and adorable toddler malapropisms, but I have never heard of a grandparent asking to be called some other non-related person’s name. (“Make the children call me ‘Horatio’ because I so admire ‘CSI: Miami’s’ David Caruso.”)
Even Romney’s family seems to have found this weird: Of his eight grandchildren, only the oldest ever called him “Ike,” according to Tagg, and she stopped when everyone else evinced a preference for “Papa.”
This odd Eisenhower admiration seems like some sort of carefully calculated (but poorly thought out) way to highlight “moderateness” while also appealing to pious sentiment. Romney explains that he admires Ike as much for his personal morals as for his actual acts, and says he feels disappointed in Jefferson, for his affair with Sally Hemings. “What for me makes people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and John Adams and George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan such extraordinary leaders is that they had integrity through and through,” he says. (I guess it’s OK to have an affair, like FDR, and own slaves, like Washington, but Romney draws the line at combining the two.)
He has an odd habit of bragging, or sort of bragging, when dealing with regular folk on the campaign trail. The New York Times (in a feature, by Ashley Parker and Michael Barbaro, entirely about how weird Mitt Romney is) has him telling a woman at a diner that he “stayed at a Courtyard hotel last night,” adding, “it’s LEED-certified.”
In his 2007 New Yorker profile, Ryan Lizza refers to it as “one-upmanship.”
After a voter at the New Hampshire diner told Romney, “My daughter goes to Michigan State,” he replied, “Oh, does she, really? My brother’s on the board of Michigan State.” When another patron said that she was from Illinois, Romney told her, “I won the straw poll at the Illinois Republican convention!”
His off-kilter interpretation of casual conversation also involves guessing at the ethnic background of strangers, poorly (“are you French-Canadian?”), and awkward joking (pretending a waitress pinched his ass). And he enjoys congratulating people, seemingly for the feat of existing and being in the vicinity of Mitt Romney.
If Nixon was epically, operatically weird — the sort of president the nation that produced Charles Manson should expect, let’s say — Romney is uninterestingly weird. First reel of “Blue Velvet” weird, without a hint of that subterranean layer of rot and perversion underlying the whole thing. Upon returning to his childhood home in Michigan for a 2012 campaign event, Romney noted that the trees were “the right height.”
Another fun — and weird — Romney fact: He models his hair not on that of his father, or that of Leland Palmer, but on his father’s top religious aide in Romney’s boyhood. From the Globe:
Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father’s sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father’s top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon Church.
“He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,” Mitt would recall years later. “I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it’s just like his was some 40 years ago.”
“Have you looked at my hair?” There is perhaps some psychological insight there: Romney is worshipful of his father, and has apparently modeled himself on a man his father trusted.
Romney’s commitment to clean living is less an individual quirk than one prescribed by his religion, but it is always amusing when a grown adult acts like a character in an Archie comic. A 2003 Boston Magazine piece has the new governor pouring Diet Vanilla Coke and regular Vanilla Coke for a family taste test. (I can only assume the sodas are caffeine-free, though there is some debate in LDS circles about the letter versus the spirit of the prohibition against “hot beverages,” which does not explicitly mention caffeine.) It also notes Romney’s regular breakfast: “cereal, egg whites, and toast without butter.” At Bain Capital, he refused to put his own money in a company that produced R-rated movies. (He did consent to allow Bain to invest.)
Even the stories of Romney’s supposed temper are ridiculous. He was arrested, in June of 1981, for disorderly conduct while attempting to launch his family boat in Cochituate State Park. He got in a heated argument with a cop who noted that the boat was not displaying its registration. Romney was hauled in in his swim trunks. Charges were dropped when he threatened to sue for false arrest. At the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics Romney got in a public confrontation with a volunteer police officer directing traffic outside an Olympic venue. Police allege Romney said “fuck” multiple times while berating the cop. Romney declined to apologize to the cop, Shaun Knopp, and while the public berating did happen — he mentions it in his book — Romney made a big point of specifically denying that he used a bad word. (In fact, Romney insisted at the time that he specifically said “H-E double hockey sticks.” Like a child. A remarkably well-behaved child speaking in earshot of his second grade teacher.) He told the Boston Globe that he had two witnesses to corroborate his denial. “I have not used that word since college — all right? — or since high school,” he said.
His mother got a bit TMI when Romney was running against Ted Kennedy in 1994. From the Times: “Where Senator Kennedy, who remarried two years ago, is still known for his hard-drinking, hard-living bachelor days after his 1981 divorce, Mr. Romney’s mother, Lenore Romney, who is 85, volunteered in an interview last week that her son and Ann waited until they were married to have sex.”
Romney recently told People magazine, “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again.” I’m not sure we should believe him. There’s no way in hell I can imagine Mitt Romney loosening up enough to have a beer.Friday, Apr 20, 2012 11:45 AM UTC
Decades of bad industrial policies helped destroy the midwest. An old-school economic plan might be the cureBy Andrew Leonard
(Credit: Tomas Skopal via Shutterstock)
Now that the primary season is functionally over and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have cleared their decks for battle, the silly season of American politics has truly arrived. The spin cycle has infinitely more attention to bestow on dogs-as-food versus dogs-strapped-on-top-of-cars, or retro attempts to pit working moms against stay-at-home moms, or the at-this-point-in-the-cycle completely meaningless innards of every new poll, than it does for sober arguments about economic policy.
And that’s a real shame, because if you’re looking for reasons to choose between Romney and Obama, the differences in their fundamental stances on economic policy deliver provocative grist. And not just because of the obvious — the traditional rhetorical orientation of Democrats for government action versus Republican reliance on relatively unregulated markets. While Romney’s economic plan offers nothing that is essentially different from standard Republican dogma dating at least as far back as Ronald Reagan, the Obama administration is giving us something new, a consciously articulated strategy dedicated to grappling with the profound changes in the global economy.
Last month, Gene Sperling, a top economic advisor to Barack Obama, gave a major speech on economic policy before the Conference on the Renaissance of American Manufacturing. The gist of the remarks: How and why the Obama administration planned to reverse the decades-long hemorrhaging of American manufacturing jobs. The details of how this would be achieved — targeted tax breaks, investments in infrastructure and education, a tougher line on trade with China — were arguably less important than the fact that the administration had decided to spell out an intellectual justification for the agenda. What’s most interesting about Sperling’s speech is how it breaks against recent Democratic resistance to industrial policy.
As an explicit, carefully researched defense of strong government action to promote the growth of the manufacturing sector — aka “industrial policy” — Sperling’s remarks were noteworthy simply because most American economists scoff at industrial policy. If they are polite, they call it “distortionary” and argue that it inefficiently diverts resources and capital from wherever the invisible hand of free market capitalism deems most appropriate. If they’re mean, they call it warmed-over command-and-control socialism and make nasty gibes about Solyndra, the failed solar power start-up that received a huge loan guarantee from the Department of Energy. But here was Sperling throwing down the gauntlet anyway, citing relevant economic literature and declaring, unambiguously, that there was a place for industrial policy in the Obama administration. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the economics, one could not ignore it as a meaningful expression of policy priorities.
In his speech, Sperling argued against the view that the decline in manufacturing’s role in the United States economy is just as inevitable as the historical decline in agriculture’s prominence. One of his main pieces of evidence is that the U.S. didn’t actually start to lose manufacturing jobs until relatively recently — around the year 2000. The manufacturing sector added 700,000 jobs between 1993 and 1999, he points out, while losing a whopping 6 million since 2000. “The dramatic loss of manufacturing employment in the past decade was a break from the past,” said Sperling. The implication being: We can fix that.
Sperling doesn’t say so directly, but by stressing the year 2000 as the turning point he’s also making an obvious political point that favorably compares the Clinton administration (of which he was a part) to the Bush administration. But this is actually the weakest part of his speech. Because the great irony underlying Sperling’s remarks is the indisputable fact that the Clinton administration was as responsible for putting in place the conditions for manufacturing job loss in the United States as any Republican administration. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations supported the neoliberal, pro-globalization “Washington consensus” of privatization and trade liberalization. Both didn’t blink an eye at the decision of American multinationals to seek cheaper labor costs overseas. Both decided that expanded trade with China was more important than human rights abuses or the impact of outsourcing on American workers. And the Clinton administration, finally, had as little interest in explicit industrial policy as did the Bush administration. Never mind the particular date on which manufacturing job losses started to accelerate — there’s no getting around the fact that the job losses of the 2000s are in part a consequence of bipartisan decisions made in the 1990s.
One can conceivably argue that few policymakers at the time realized just how momentous the impact of the end of the Cold War, China and India’s turn toward market-oriented capitalism, and massive technological advances in computing, networking and telecommunications would be. Looking back now, it seems obvious that adding a couple of billion cheaply employable workers to global labor markets would have had a dramatic impact on the developed world. But during the Clinton boom years, both Democratic and Republican policymakers went along with the consensus economic wisdom: All sides would benefit from increased trade. Sure, there would be winners and losers, but in the end, the net effect would be that all boats would rise.
And in one sense, that was true. The world is richer now than it was in 1990. A smaller percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty. The extraordinary advances in living standards in Asia probably outweigh the relative decline of the middle class in the United States and Europe. If we focus on the world as a whole, rather than on individual nation-states, we can make a good argument that there are clear benefits from globalization.
But hindsight also tells us that those benefits were not distributed equally in the United States. The multinationals did fantastically well, and the top 1 percent of Americans prospered, but they did so at the expense of the 99 percent. Income inequality grew. Middle-class incomes stagnated. Manufacturing jobs disappeared. And Rust Belt America became increasingly angry.
In fact, one way of looking at Sperling’s speech is as a political promise of help aimed at voters in crucial Midwestern swing states that have been hammered by globalization. This doesn’t necessarily mean Sperling is being hypocritical. The Obama administration certainly believes that rescuing General Motors and Chrysler and spending stimulus money supporting electric battery development in Michigan (classic industrial policy) were good steps to take, both as economic policy and political strategy. (The sharp decline in Michigan’s unemployment rate, from over 14 percent to 8.5 percent, offers solid evidence to support that view.) The point to note here is that changed circumstances resulted in changed policy. In the aftermath of all-out, no rules globalization, the Obama administration has decided that perhaps it is time to make a course correction.
And this is where the difference between Obama and Romney is most pointed. Romney’s 87-page economic blueprint, “Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth,” lays out a very familiar prescription of lower taxes and lower regulations as the cure for all of America’s economic evils. He’s all about defending the “free enterprise system” from unions and government bureaucrats and we’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it — it’s standard Republican fare. But perhaps that is exactly what is most remarkable: Romney’s prescriptions betray not one hint of understanding that a different world requires different strategies. Romney’s platform is a lukewarm reformulation of exactly the same now-discredited Washington consensus policies that initially helped to put American workers at a distinct competitive disadvantage in global markets.
If there’s one argument that comes through in Sperling’s speech, it’s that individual corporate actors acting in their own best interest in a free market can result in negative consequences for the larger society. The invisible hand can screw up.
For any single firm, the decision to move production elsewhere may make economic sense. But that decision impacts suppliers and the local talent pool. This makes the decision even easier for the next firm to leave and even harder for the next firm considering coming there to say yes … For example, when we lost consumer electronics manufacturing, we gave up a claim on future innovation. We lost in follow-on products like advanced batteries, flat-panel display technology and LED lighting.
That’s not an argument we would have heard Sperling make when he was deputy director of the National Economic Council under Clinton. But that’s exactly what’s so refreshing. As John Maynard Keynes may or may not have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” The experience of the last few decades has given us loads of new data on what happens when industries move across borders. Sanity demands that we absorb that data and act upon it.Continue ReadingCloseThursday, Apr 19, 2012 5:03 PM UTC
To win in November, Obama needs a bolder economic strategy that tackles the underlying issue: Widening inequalityBy Robert ReichPresident Barack Obama speaks at a fundraising reception at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Mich., Wednesday, April 18, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
(Credit: AP)
This originally appeared on Robert Reich’s blog.
President Obama’s electoral strategy can best be summed up as: “We’re on the right track, my economic policies are working, we still have a long way to go but stick with me and you’ll be fine.”
That’s not good enough. This recovery is too anemic, and the chance of an economic stall between now and Election Day far too high.
Even now, Mitt Romney’s empty “I’ll to it better” refrain is attracting as many voters as Obama’s “we’re on the right track.” Each man is gathering 46 percent of voter support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. Only 33 percent of the public thinks the economy is improving while 40 percent say they’re still falling behind financially — an 11 point increase from 2008. Nearly two-thirds are concerned about paying for housing, and one in five with mortgages say they’re underwater.
If the economy stalls, Romney’s empty promise will look even better. And I’d put the odds of a stall at 50-50. That puts the odds of a Romney presidency far too high for comfort. Need I remind you that Romney enthusiastically supports Paul Ryan’s wildly regressive budget, and as president would be able to make at least one or possibly two Supreme Court appointments, and control the EPA and every other federal agency and department?
The Obama White House should face it: “We’re on the right track” isn’t sufficient. The president has to offer the nation a clear, bold strategy for boosting the economy. It should be the economic mandate for his second term.
It should consist of four points:
First, Obama should demand that the nation’s banks modify mortgages of homeowners still struggling in the wake of Wall Street’s housing bubble — threatening that if the banks fail to do so he’ll fight to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act and break up Wall Street’s biggest banks (as the Dallas Fed recently recommended).
Second, he should condemn oil speculators for keeping gas prices high — demanding that the oil companies allow the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation to set limits on such speculation and instructing the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute oil price manipulation.
Third, he should stand ready to make further job-creating investments in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, and renew his call for an infastructure bank. And while he understands the need to reduce the nation’s long-term budget deficit, he won’t allow austerity economics to take precedence over job creation. He’ll veto budget cuts until unemployment is down to 5 percent.
Finally, he should make clear the underlying problem is widening inequality. With so much of the nation’s disposable income and wealth going to the top, the vast middle class doesn’t have the purchasing power it needs to fire up the economy. That’s why the Buffett rule, setting a minimum tax rate for millionaires, is just a first step for ensuring that the gains from growth are widely shared.
The president can still say we’re on the right track. But he should also say he’s not content with the pace of the recovery and will do everything in his power to quicken it. And he should ask the American people for a mandate in his second term to make the economy work for everyone, not just those at the top.
Such a mandate can be put into effect only with a Congress that’s committed to better jobs and wages for all Americans. He should remind voters that congressional Republicans prevented him from doing all that was needed in the first term, and they must not be allowed to do so again.Continue ReadingCloseThursday, Apr 19, 2012 12:00 PM UTC
With Kris Kobach controlling his immigration message, Mitt can’t move to the centerBy Jefferson Morley
How do you say “pivot” in Spanish? Cambiar su postura. No sooner had Mitt Romney sewn up the Republican presidential nomination, than he did just that, offering messages tailored to appeal, not to just Republican primary voters, but to general election voters of Mexican, Central American and Caribbean descent. The Obama campaign shadowed Romney’s moves by launching “Latinos for Obama” yesterday and floating the cocky but not impossible idea that the president might carry Arizona in November with Latino help. After months of being ignored in favor of white conservatives, the Latino voter is now center stage in campaign 2012.
Romney’s desire to maneuver is transparent. When he hired Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House pollster and immigration moderate, the Hill newspaper saw ” a sign the campaign will heavily court Hispanic voters — perhaps at the expense of immigration hard-liners in the party.” Then Romney allowed himself to be overheard telling supporters that “we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” and warning that overwhelming Hispanic support for Obama “spells doom for us.” He also mouthed approving sounds about Marco Rubio’s pitch for a Republican version of the DREAM Act. Republican immigration advocate Tamar Jacoby pronounced herself “thrilled.”
But the perils of the pivot emerged when Romney’s campaign tried to Etch A Sketch away the candidate’s working relationship with Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and immigration hard-liner. It was Kobach who persuaded Romney to advocate “self-deportation” as the solution to the presence of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. When a campaign spokesperson told Politico on Monday that Kobach is not a campaign “advisor” but a “supporter,” Kobach responded by telling Think Progress that his relationship with the campaign has not changed. Then he upped the ante by telling WaPo’s Greg Sargent that Rubio’s idea is an unacceptable variation on amnesty and he expects Romney to reject it.
How long can Kris Kobach maintain de facto control of Romney’s immigration message? With Romney’s Latino poll numbers sinking toward single digits and Gillespie taking a larger role in the campaign, it may not be long. Restrictionist blogger Mickey Kaus thinks Romney is most likely to make a “targeted concession” such as backing a variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, by most accounts, is planning to introduce a bill to legalize the status of high-achieving undocumented students in coming weeks with an eye toward forcing a Senate floor vote in the fall.
Both pro-and anti-immigration advocates deride Rubio’s idea as a stunt, and, depending on its language, it may be. But the Romney campaign has no better card to play. “The dreamers,” as the students call themselves, are held in high esteem by the Latinos, nine out ten of whom support for the DREAM Act. And fortunately for Romney, two leading student groups that have fought for the DREAM Act say they are open to Rubio’s idea.
“We definitely support the concept,” Mohammad Abdollah of DreamActivist.org told Salon. “From everything we’ve heard, it sounds like something we could support. We need relief. If it comes from a Democratic or a Republican proposal, for us it doesn’t matter.”
Gaby Pacheo of United We Dream, which is supported by the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Obama, was more cautious.
“We’re willing to entertain the idea,” she said. “We’re glad to see a Republican coming forward on this issue. We want to see what the bill says and who are the Republicans who will also support it. Rubio is going to need support not just in the Senate but in the House as well. Where are Mitch McConnell and John Boehner?” The message seems clear. Without Republican support in the House, Rubio’s measure cannot become law and if it can’t become law it will get no help from its putative beneficiaries.
And therein lie the limits of Romney’s ability to pivot on the immigration issue: his allies. To send Latino voters a new message in the fall, he needs the cooperation of Kris Kobach and the Republican congressional leadership, neither of whom is inclined to give it.
The anti-immigration forces say pandering to Latinos who won’t vote Republican anyway will be less effective for Romney than running hard against Obama’s economic record. This strategy has its limits too. The post-2008 downturn, it turns out, has been less severe for Latinos than for whites. A Pew Hispanic Center study found Latinos lost less than whites in the 2007-09 recession and gained more in the 2009-2011 recovery. Latinos are now gaining jobs at twice the rate of whites. So the economic issue is not as sharp as it might be. Besides, wrote Ali Noorani of National Immigration Forum in a column for Fox News, “no one is going to listen to your economic message if you want to deport their mother.”
Obama’s pitch to Latinos is an ethnically flavored variation on his general election message: I saved you from disaster and delivered benefits.
President Obama has spent the first three years of his term working to restore economic security to the middle class and Latino community. He’s kept nearly 2 million Latinos out of poverty, doubled the amount spent on Pell Grants so 150,000 more Latino students can afford their educations. And by 2014, Obamacare will provide health coverage to 9 million Latinos who are currently uninsured.
Romney’s pitch to Latinos? It’s a work in progress.Continue ReadingCloseWednesday, Apr 18, 2012 4:24 PM UTC
The dumbest columnist in the world calls for Mayor Mike to save America with third-party pixie dustBy Alex PareeneThomas Friedman
(Credit: AP)
Thomas Friedman, globe-trotting superstar New York Times columnist and America’s foremost Big Thinker, noticed recently that America is Broken, and by “America” he means an escalator, in a parking garage, at the train station in Washington. There is only one man who can fix this escalator that represents America: Famed escalator repairman and billionaire mogul Mike Bloomberg.
I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.
And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.
Sure, yes, that is a very logical progression. “I had crappy cellphone service on the train because of the two-party system. Save me, Mayor Bloomberg.” In Bloomberg’s America, calls wouldn’t be dropped! Under Bloomberg’s aegis, every single escalator in New York is operational. Men are escalated to and from basements and mezzanines like kings in our shimmering parking garages that are an inspiration to the world.
Because he is a sophist and a fool, Friedman takes mild inconveniences suffered on a trip from one enclave of wealth and power to another to be proof of national decline and his prescription is based primarily on clapping really hard for Tinkerbell.
Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared. And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing. Congress would have to take note.
THE NEAR FUTURE: Mitch McConnell picks up the day’s Washington Post. A1 headline: “BLOOMBERG CALLS FOR SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS ON IMPORTANT ISSUES.” McConnell gasps! “Get me Boehner,” he shouts. “It’s time to get serious on comprehensive revenue-raising tax reform, and escalator repair.”
What I enjoy most about this column is that it comes as the Times’ grown-up columnists were having a debate about the merits and goals of “centrism” that had at least some sort of connection to observable political reality. Then little Tommy Friedman arrives with his touching plea for the magical third-party man to solve all of America’s problems (broken escalators) with his centrism wizard staff. You can’t even refute his argument, because there is no argument. “America needs leaders who share all of the priorities of the current administration but who have Big Ideas like fixing this broken escalator with tax reform.”Continue ReadingCloseMonday, Apr 16, 2012 8:48 PM UTC
His approval jumped after he adopted a feistier populist tone last fall. So Third Way centrists want him to stop it VIDEOBy Joan Walsh
(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
In the last few months President Obama’s approval rating has steadily climbed, while he’s maintained a reliable if small lead over Republican Mitt Romney. Notwithstanding today’s Gallup daily tracking poll; daily tracking polls are meaningless. In the CNN poll also released Monday, he leads Romney 52-43 percent.
The question no one can answer definitively is why Obama’s fortunes improved after his miserable summer. Now that the race is a one-on-one contest, the debate over that question will intensify.
I’m of the oft-stated opinion that the president’s feistier populist rhetoric has driven his improved standing in the polls (more on why I think that shortly). But along comes the New York Times’ Bill Keller, with almost no data, to tell me I’m wrong. Keller insists Obama is turning off independents by being what he calls “a plutocrat-bashing firebrand” and pushing “Robin Hood” politics like the Buffett Rule. The source for Keller’s certainty? A recent poll by Third Way, a group that exists expressly to pull the Democratic Party to the right.
Third Way’s much-hyped poll warned Obama against his newfound passion for “fairness,” and particularly the issue of income inequality, suggesting that independent voters in swing states are put off by it. Those “swing independents,” Third Way says, prefer a message of “opportunity” to one that highlights income inequality. If you’re like me, you’ll say there’s no conflict, since Obama often makes the case that reducing income inequality creates more opportunity, for everyone. But Third Way insists, with no evidence that I can see, that the fairness message is just a big downer and will overpower the “opportunity” messaging if they’re combined. They also make a big deal of swing independents’ concerns about the budget deficit, even though the group’s “number one priority,” in Third Way’s own words, is “economic growth and jobs.” (Other than that, it’s a great poll.)
There are many ways to take apart Third Way’s results: Mike Lux and Jonathan Chait did a terrific job. Lux challenged its methodology, suggesting that the poll undersampled both seniors and working-class voters, two important swing groups who, in other surveys, seem much more open to a populist message.
Chait pointed to the way the group appears to have crafted their questions to get the answers they wanted – that’s why advocacy polls are so rarely cited — with bland nostrums about fairness, opportunity and deficits. A recent Greenberg Quinlan poll on similar issues, using very concrete language, found that roughly three-quarters of those polled backed a feisty fairness message. Chait notes:
Eighty-one percent of those surveyed agreed that “[r]egular people work harder and harder for less and less, while Wall Street CEOs enjoy bigger bonuses than ever.”
Seventy-five percent agreed that “[o]ur economy works for Wall Street CEOs but not for the middle class. America isn’t supposed to only work for the top 1 percent.”
Seventy-two percent agreed that “right now, 99 percent of Americans only see the rich getting richer and everyone else getting crushed. And they’re right.”
But Bill Keller ignores all that and uses the Third Way poll anyway to warn Obama against too much populism. As Greg Sargent pointed out, Keller even ignored his own paper’s polling on the way to his dubious conclusion: 55 percent of independents said investment income should be taxed the same as employment income in a recent CBS/New York Times poll, and 58 percent of independents say rich people don’t pay their fair share. Last week’s Washington Post poll revealed that a majority thinks unfairness in our economy is a bigger concern than “overregulation,” by a 57-32 margin. (Other than that, Keller’s column was great.)
Even if Third Way is wrong, we still don’t have an answer for why the president’s numbers improved after the summer. We know they’re partially driven by a shift among women voters, and it seems like common sense to attribute that to the so-called GOP War on Women, on national issues ranging from contraception to funding for programs that help women and children most, and on state-level measures like transvaginal ultrasounds, fetal-personhood amendments, and Arizona’s draconian antiabortion law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer last week.
Another factor behind Obama’s improved fortunes has to be the improved economy. In a rough way, Obama’s climbing approval rating seems to track a decline in the unemployment rate: According to Real Clear Politics’ polling composite, he hit a low of 43 percent approval (with 53 percent disapproval) at the end of August, when unemployment was persistently over 9 percent. By March, unemployment had dropped to 8.2 percent, and Obama’s approval rating had climbed to a hair shy of the magic number of 50.
But it’s not that simple. From early July to late August, with unemployment steady, the president’s approval rating dropped from a tie of 46 percent to a 10-point negative gap: 53 percent disapproval to 43 percent approval. All that happened in there was the depressing debt-ceiling battle, after which even most independents said they wished the president had stood up to the GOP. His approval ratings stayed in the low 40s through early December, though unemployment began to decline in September. They didn’t really begin to rise until January, after the president’s populist speeches in Osawatomie, Kan., and at State of the Union time.
Besides, an earlier decline in the unemployment rate, from 10 percent in October 2009 to 9.4 in June 2010, was actually accompanied by a decline in Obama approval, from 52-40 approval-disapproval in October to 47-47 the next June.
All that is by way of saying: Declining unemployment alone can’t explain the relative change in the president’s political fortunes. His return to the populism that marked the end of the 2008 campaign almost certainly played a role. He has set up the 2012 election as a contest between the GOP’s message of “You’re on your own” vs. “We’re all in this together.” His economic feistiness, not just the GOP’s contraception craziness, is likely driving his revival among women, who remain the most vulnerable in a recession.
Moreover, I’d argue that the president is actually doing a decent job combining a message that explains how fairness can also lead to more opportunity, despite Third Way’s conviction that it can’t be done. In my opinion, he could be even more explicit. Early in his presidency, Obama was slow to explain to the American people the way government in the past – from the 1930s through the early ’70s — helped create opportunity by deliberately reducing income inequality to build a middle class that became the envy of the world – a middle class that Republican policies are dismantling. There is no conflict between fairness and opportunity, unless your definition of “fairness” involves skewing the tax code even more overwhelmingly toward the wealthy.
I should say here, and I’ll say it again every time I write about Obama’s numbers until November: This is going to be a very close race, and people who think Romney is mortally wounded by the primary battle are wrong.
But the answer isn’t watering down Obama’s new message, it’s taking the opportunity to make his message even clearer: Fairness, including reducing income inequality, creates opportunity and prosperity. We all do better when we all do better.Continue ReadingClose
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