Monthly Archives: October 2012

The West Wing and other fantasies

October 8, 2012 – 1:09 pm

When the Left wanted to escape from the Bush administration, they watched “The West Wing”. They didn’t stop believing that Bush was president or stop believing that any numbers were true, or create their own polls in which John Kerry was up by 15 points. … The Right, I think, has retreated into their own universe in which they are winning, they are the majority, and Barack Obama was never elected president.

—  Joy Reid

This week everybody was talking about the debate Romney won

Or maybe the one that President Obama lost. The New Yorker’s cover expressed the situation pretty well.

The short version is that Romney finally shook the Etch-a-Sketch and brought back Moderate Mitt, who hadn’t been seen all year. Obama seemed unfocused and didn’t make Romney pay a price for either his sudden about-face or his mis-characterizations of both the president’s policies and his own.

Obama’s passivity and moderator Jim Lehrer’s unwillingness to enforce discipline allowed Romney to dominate the debate, getting the last word on every segment. CBS’ snap poll indicated that 46% of undecided viewers believed Romney won the debate, compared to 22% who thought Obama won.

Aside from a pervasive depression about an election that had seemed in the bag before the debate, liberals like me were left with a series of questions:

  • What was wrong with Obama? All kinds of theories cropped up: overconfidence, the altitude, bad strategy, and so on. To me, none of them seem more compelling than the explanation that he just had a bad day. The most optimistic explanation is that he has a four-debate strategy, and that the whole point of the first debate was to get Romney to commit to either Moderate Mitt or Mr. Conservative. Maybe.
  • What are the facts about Romney’s tax plan, pre-existing conditions, and other disputed points? I’ll cover Romney’s tax and budget proposals (such as they are) in a separate post. Once again, Romney claimed to cover pre-existing conditions on national TV, only to have his staff walk it back later. In short, all Romney promises is not repeal the legal protections that have existed since 1996.
  • How big a difference will the debate make in the election? As much as everybody likes a winner, I don’t think anybody goes into the voting booth thinking: “I’m going to vote for this guy because he won the debate.” Rather, winning the debate means creating a moment that will change people’s minds. It’s not clear that happened. Romney’s performance, IMO, will cause viewers to take another look at him. Whether they’ll like what they see is another question. Nate Silver believes Obama’s lead has shrunk from around 4.5% to between 1% and 2%, but sees signs that Romney’s momentum has already faded.
  • Would conservatives let Romney get away with moving to the center? The answer seems to be Yes. Chris Hayes had this absolutely right: “The thing that conservatives care the most about is pissing off liberals. … If you can infuriate liberals by moving to the left and confounding their beloved president, [conservatives] are going to love you. They don’t care. One more thing: They don’t really worry that [Romney] would  actually do what he says.”
  • If his sudden pivot to the center wins the election for Romney, which Mitt will take office in January? My money is on the “severe conservative”. Particularly if the Republicans retain the House and make gains in the Senate (as they probably will if the climate changes enough to elect Romney), only “severely conservative” bills will come to his desk. Can you really picturing him vetoing them?

Finally, the most memorable moment of the debate may hurt Romney: his threat to Big Bird. Romney’s promises to cut taxes and raise defense spending, while protecting Medicare and Social Security for current and near-future retirees leaves him with a credibility problem on the deficit: What is he going to cut to make the numbers work?

Needing some kind of example, Romney picked PBS, whose subsidy amounts to one ten-thousandth of the federal budget. “I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too” he told moderator Jim Lehrer (from PBS), “but I’m not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”

That prompted a huge save-Big-Bird response on the Internet, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek. The visuals said it best.

… and new jobs report

Romney’s Wednesday-night momentum was blunted by Friday morning: The new jobs report puts unemployment below 8% for the first time since Obama took office. The drop was not dramatic, but continued the generally improving pattern of the last two-and-a-half years.

Conservatives reacted to the news the way they react to any facts they don’t like: It can’t be true. Either Obama has a method (which no one identified) for manipulating the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which has no political appointees), or Democrats are lying to the survey-takers about having jobs, or something.

… and you also might find this interesting

A behind-the-scenes battle is going on in news organizations around the country about what to call people who enter the United States illegally and/or stay without a visa or other official documentation. Are they illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, or what?

The argument gained a little attention when it appeared in the blog of the New York Times’ Public Editor, who defends The Times’ usage of illegal immigrant as “clear and accurate”. Jose Antonio Vargas, whose NYT Magazine article “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” touched off a furor in 2011, is campaigning for undocumented, which  NYT standards editor Phil Corbett considers a “euphemism“.

A good discussion of this topic appeared on Sunday’s Up with Chris Hayes.

Illegal vs. undocumented is a very instructive example of framing, which can seem arcane in the abstract. Even if the illegal and undocumented refer to the same people, each term favors a particular course of action. If immigrants are illegal, the obvious thing to do is arrest them. But if they are undocumented, the simplest solution is to issue them papers. A reporter who doesn’t want to advocate either approach still has to call these immigrants something.

When I’m trying to be neutral, I think I’m going to use unprocessed, which doesn’t specify whether resolution requires a criminal or a bureaucratic process.

Want to reduce the number of abortions? Then you should be advocating for ObamaCare’s contraception mandate.

A new study of women in St. Louis found that counseling about contraception combined with free access to the contraception method of their choice led to dramatically lower rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions.

Will anti-abortion activists seize on this new information and demand the contraception mandate be upheld? Of course not. As worked up as the religious right gets about ultrasounds of fetuses, abortion is actually a screen for other issues, most notably promiscuity. The sky will fall if women can enjoy sex without consequences, and even if contraception could eliminate abortion entirely, traditionalists would find the price too high.

In 2010, climate change was a losing issue. Republicans who were on record supporting cap-and-trade or other action had to quickly recant (like John McCain) or lose a primary (like Rep. Bob Inglis). Democrats didn’t do much better with it, and most were happy if the topic never came up.

Democrats have mostly stayed silent in 2012 as well, but that may be a mistake. Mother Jones’ Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science) argues that public opinion on climate change has shifted recently, and for a very interesting reason.

If you remember the mid-2000s, the icon of global warming was the polar bear. From a public opinion standpoint, this was a disaster: It rendered the issue remote, in both time and space. The fear was about future devastation, in a place where most people have never been and will never go.

The new face of global warming, though, is extreme weather: droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, skipped winters, and so on.

Global warming is now … about something that is just not right in your surroundings, and in the rhythm of your own life.

Mitt Romney played to the old framing in his convention speech: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.” His audience laughed.

Obama struck back with the new frame: “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.” Unfortunately, that was a single-news-cycle exchange. So far, there’s no indication that Obama or Democrats in general recognize climate change as a winning issue.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

What do we know about Romney’s tax and budget plans?

October 8, 2012 – 12:29 pm

The first Obama/Romney debate on Wednesday had a playground quality to it: One contestant would say “You did X”, the other would say “No I didn’t”, and then either Obama would let it drop or Romney would repeat “Yes you did!”. Jim Lehrer refused to play teacher, so it was left to fact-checkers and other pundits to determine the truth afterwards.

On no subject was the truth less obvious than on Romney’s budget plans. President Obama laid it out like this:

Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut — on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts — that’s another trillion dollars — and $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military hasn’t asked for. That’s $8 trillion. How we pay for that, reduce the deficit, and make the investments that we need to make, without dumping those costs onto middle-class Americans, I think is one of the central questions of this campaign.

And Governor Romney flatly denied it:

I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.

Fact-checkers tried to apply their usual categories — true, false, misleading — but often they just added to the confusion. CNN, for example, said Obama’s charge was false, but graded Romney’s denial as “incomplete”, whatever that means.

Here’s what’s going on: The press is afraid of bias accusations, so it hides behind rules of objectivity that have gotten increasingly technical. Campaigns have gotten good at manipulating those rules, so the objective press has a hard time announcing simple judgments. Judgments, then, are left to the partisan voices, who just increase the noise.

The Weekly Sift makes a lesser claim: I’m not objective, I just try to be honest and give you enough links to check my accuracy. So let’s see if some common sense can cut through the confusion.

The $5 trillion tax cut. Mitt Romney has proposed a tax plan, sort of. On his web site, the full plan to “create 12 million new jobs” has four “economic pillars”, one of which is:

Reform The Nation’s Tax Code To Increase Growth And Job Creation.

o Reduce individual marginal income tax rates across-the-board by 20 percent, while keeping current low tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Reduce the corporate income tax rate – the highest in the world – to 25 percent.
o Broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.

The idea is that people pay a lower tax rate, but that more income gets taxed (“broaden the tax base”), so the government winds up with the same amount of money (“revenue neutral”).

There’s no reason that can’t work in theory, but notice that the marginal-tax-rate cut (the attractive part of the plan) is specified at 20%, while “broaden the tax base” (the unattractive part) is left vague. Elsewhere, Romney promises to eliminate the alternate minimum tax (which falls almost entirely on the wealthy) and the federal estate tax (which only applies to multi-million-dollar estates).

So if you evaluate Romney’s plan by what he has specified — the tax cuts — it’s a $5 trillion tax cut over the next ten years. Now, that’s not entirely fair, because whatever plan he eventually proposes to Congress would also specify the base-broadening part. The rate-cut is part of a “revenue neutral” tax plan in the same way that Cocoa Puffs are “part of this complete breakfast”.

So Romney is technically correct in saying “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut.” But let me flesh that out by putting true words in Romney’s mouth: “I don’t have a plan to cut government revenue by $5 trillion. I have a revenue-neutral plan, but the only part of it I’m willing to spell out before the election cuts federal revenue by $5 trillion.”

So he still needs to specify what currently untaxed income will be taxed in order to raise the $5 trillion that his plan needs to fulfill his revenue-neutral pledge.

Growth or funny money? If you read the details on the web site, a big chunk of that previously untaxed income is money that just wouldn’t exist otherwise. Romney’s plan estimates that the economy will grow at a 2.5% rate with the current tax system, but that under his plan (including his similarly vague plan to de-regulate business and other plans he considers growth-inducing) the economy will grow at a 4% rate.

When you compound that over ten years, the difference is huge. Current GDP is around $15 trillion per year. Ten years of 2.5% growth get you to $19 trillion, but ten years of 4% growth get you to $22 trillion, which is almost 16% bigger. So in the tenth year, the 20% rate cut is almost balanced by the growth alone. The extra income you need to broaden the tax base is almost entirely manna that fell from Heaven.

The question is whether you believe any of that. The idea that tax cuts create growth is dogma among conservatives, but recent history doesn’t bear them out. We were promised the cornucopia of growth when Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, but it didn’t arrive. Even with a bubble-based illusion of growth, median household income declined. Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reports:

When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income — the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below — stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That’s a decline of 4.2 per cent. That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

In the debate, Romney refused any historical comparison. (“My plan is not like anything that’s been tried before.”) But his web site justifies the growth assumptions by looking at the recovery from the 1981-82 recession during the Reagan administration. The problem is that this recession (like the one before it) looks nothing like the 1981-82 recession. The Reagan recession was brought on by the high interest rates (over 20%!) that the Fed imposed to kill off the inflation plague of the 1970s. As the Fed cut rates back to more normal levels, the economy could resume a normal growth pattern, plus make up for lost time.

The last two recessions were set off by popping bubbles: the dot-com bubble of the late 90s and the housing bubble of the Bush years. Recoveries from bubbles are slower, because the previous level was illusory. Let me repeat that: The Obama Recovery is slower than Reagan’s because the level we are trying to recover to was a mirage.

Even if we grant Romney’s 4% growth assumption, the difference in the first year would be small, while the tax-cut hit would be as large as ever. Would the Tea Party types in Congress really accept a budget where the deficit continued to climb for several years while we waited for growth to catch up?

I personally have no confidence in Romney’s growth assumptions. If he’s really going to broaden the tax base, he’s going to have to extend taxes to real income, not imaginary income from the growth fairy.

Deductions. The one real base-broadening idea Romney has floated is to cap deductions. In the debate he said:

But in order for us not to lose revenue, have the government run out of money, I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions, so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth.

One trial balloon suggested that deductions be capped at $17,000, though in the debate Romney refused to be pinned down to any specific number:

what are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance? One way, for instance, would be to have a single number. Make up a number, $25,000, $50,000. Anybody can have deductions up to that amount. And then that number disappears for high-income people.

That approach has a problem: If you don’t accept Romney’s growth assumption, eliminating all deductions for upper-income people doesn’t replace the $5 trillion in revenue. So he’s forced to break his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income people — not all middle-income people, but quite a few. When you add up mortgage interest, state and local taxes, medical expenses, and so on, it’s not hard for a household of slightly-above-average income to hit a $17,000 cap, and even easier to hit some much-lower cap that would really raise $5 trillion.

I know because I did my parents’ taxes last year. In 2011, my parents were in “the 47%” of people who paid no federal income tax. My mother died that year, and both parents spent time in nursing homes, so their medical expenses wiped out their $50,000 of income. Under the Romney plan, with a $17K deduction cap, they’d have owed thousands.

So Al Sharpton is right: “This election isn’t about Obama, it’s about your momma.”

Tax fairness. Romney’s pledge not to favor the rich in his tax plan is very carefully worded: “I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”

This echoes a common conservative framing of taxes. Over the last 30 years, the share of the national income that has gone to the very rich has skyrocketed. Under Romney’s policies, it would presumably continue to skyrocket, because of de-regulation, non-enforcement of antitrust laws, and so on. But all he pledges is to keep their share of taxes the same.

Think about it this way: Imagine a two-person economy that makes $10, with $6 going to the richer guy and $4 to the poorer guy. Imagine their government collects $2 in taxes; let’s say $1.50 from the richer guy and 50 cents from the poorer guy, so that their after-tax incomes are $5.50 and $4.50.

Now imagine that inequality increases, so that the rich guy makes $8 and the poor guy $2. But suppose the government keeps their taxes the same: The rich guy still pays $1.50 and the poor guy 50 cents, so that their after-tax incomes are $6.50 and $1.50.

That system would fulfill Romney’s tax-fairness pledge: the rich guy still pays 75% of the taxes.  But it isn’t fair at all. The rich guy’s tax rate goes down from 25% to 18.75%. The poor guy’s goes up from 12.5% to 25%.

In short: When the rich make more of the money, their share of the taxes should increase, not stay the same.

Spending cuts. The situation on the spending side of Romney’s plan is similar: He has spelled out his spending increases — defense, mostly. And he has pledged not to cut Medicare of Social Security benefits for anyone currently over 55. In other words, even if he serves eight years, he will never submit a budget that shows a spending cut in either of those two giant entitlements.

But he also pledges to get federal spending down to 20% of GDP by 2016, which (even with his optimistic 4% growth assumption) means $500 billion of annual cuts. The only sizable cut he identifies on his web site is $95 billion by repealing ObamaCare. But repealing ObamaCare also repeals the cost savings and tax increases it contains, and so increases the deficit rather than decreasing it. And “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.” not use it to decrease the deficit. And he was open to retaining the improved drug benefits ObamaCare adds to Medicare.

So the ObamaCare cut is illusion. It won’t cut the deficit.

Romney’s other specified cuts are Amtrak; the national endowments for art, humanities, and public broadcasting (bye-bye, Big Bird); the Legal Services Corporation; family planning; and foreign aid. By Romney’s own account, the total savings (other than ObamaCare) is only $2.6 billion of the $500 billion he says he needs.

So he has specified about half a percent of the cuts his budget needs under his optimistic assumptions. And the biggest parts of the budget — defense, Social Security, Medicare — are off limits. The non-ObamaCare cuts he has specified are insufficient even to cover the increase he wants in defense spending.

That’s why Obama accused him of “gutting our investments in schools and education”, and how Romney was able to deny it: “I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers. … I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and — and grants that go to people going to college.”

“I don’t have any plan to cut …” is a universal dodge for Romney. Because he doesn’t have any plan to cut spending, Romney can deny any specific thing you imagine must be cut to plug the huge hole in his budget. The Ryan budget is a little more specific about cuts, but Romney disclaims that as well. His campaign says “as president he will be putting together his own plan.” And Romney has emphasized that he, not Ryan, is “the guy running for president.”

In short, what Romney has given us is a lot of specifics that cut taxes and raise spending, coupled with vague promises to make it all come out right somehow. So electing Romney is sort of like hiring a trainer who promises you can eat more and lose weight. He has pictures of the lavish meals his plan will let you eat, and a graph of how your weight will go down.

How does it work? “Exercise” he says. What exercise? When? How much? “We can work all that out later.”

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

The Monday Morning Teaser

October 8, 2012 – 8:41 am

I’m still in the Midwest, putting the Sift together at a Panera rather than at home in my office. That adds an element of unpredictability to the day (plus an hour of time change), so if the Sift isn’t showing up as quickly as you expect, have patience.

The big news this week, of course, was the presidential debate. Why was Obama so listless? Were any of the charges and counter-charges true? How has Romney’s good showing affected the race? And so on. I’m trying not to get completely absorbed by the hype, but there is also some actual newsworthiness in there.

The weekly summary will be called “The West Wing and other fantasies”, after something Joy Reid said Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes. The short notes include some fascinating stuff about how the public discussion of global warming has changed, new data on how effective free contraception can be at reducing the abortion rate, the battle within newsrooms about whether immigrants are “illegal” or “undocumented”, and more.

The only separate article will address the question: What do we really know about Mitt Romney’s tax and budget proposals?

Previous teasers have told you the reason I’ve been in the Midwest: my father’s health. He died last Monday night and the funeral was Saturday. I’ll be going back home tomorrow, so I expect the Sift to return to normal next week. Life, I suppose, will find a new normal.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (4)

Honey, I Shrunk American Politics

October 1, 2012 – 1:08 pm

Our politics are essentially failing right now. … Choosing between candidates is supposed to be the way we choose between policies in important things that affect our country or national security. But our politics have been allowed to shrink. If one side doesn’t want to talk about it, we’re not going to debate it as a country.

— Rachel Maddow

This week everybody was still talking about the collapse of the Romney campaign

We have no so little patience these days that we can’t even wait for a guy to lose before we start debating why he lost. I said what I want to say about that in this article: The Romney Pre-mortems

… so conservatives claimed the polls were skewed

It’s a conspiracy to depress the Republican vote, you see. And all the pollsters are in on it, including Fox News. Fortunately, conservatives found one of their own to un-skew the polls, and — surprise! — Romney is actually way ahead!

A quick explanation of what’s going on: Conservatives smelled a rat when they looked into the details of the Obama-is-winning polls: Romney was running strong among Independents, but Obama was winning because the poll showed many fewer Republicans than Democrats. So if you unskew the polls by setting the Democrat/Republican ratio back to, say, what it was in 2008 exit polls, you get Romney ahead!

Josh Marshall explains why that makes no sense. The low number of Republicans and Romney’s good results among Independents are both caused by the same thing: Since 2008, a lot of Republicans have started calling themselves Independents. (That’s what the Tea Party was all about.)

… and liberals started debating whether to vote Green

Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf explained why he can’t vote for Obama. I took the online quiz and found that the candidate who best expresses my views is the Green Party’s Jill Stein. So who am I voting for? Obama.

Sorry, Jill: I’m not voting Green

Already, a comment on that article has pointed me to this great video explanation of the problems with our voting system:

And we’re also talking about the continuing anti-American protests in the Muslim world

which makes this Cracked.com spoof from the Bush years relevant again

Or, if satire is too subtle, RT’s Abby Martin will spell it out for you.

and you might also find this stuff interesting

Republican election officials are looking very hard for the many illegal voters they know must exist, but they’re not finding them.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler started out claiming there might be as many as 11,805 non-citizens on the roles, but after some investigating, he’s down to 141 (out of 3.5 million total voters). 35 of those 141 have voted. Eight of those 35 are in Denver, so the local Denver officials checked them out. They seem to be citizens.

So there might actually be no non-citizen voters in Colorado at all.

Meanwhile, voter-registration fraud has been uncovered in Florida. But the fraud is by Republicans. An organization hired by the Republican Party to do voter registration turns out to have turned in at least 100 “questionable” registrations. The guy behind this company is a long-time dirty-trickster, so while the Party has now distanced themselves from him, it’s impossible that they didn’t know he was a bad guy when they hired him.

In explaining all this, Josh Marshall makes a good point: voter registration fraud is not voter fraud.

To be clear, just because you register Mickey Mouse or Mary Poppins to vote doesn’t mean they’re going to show up to vote. Indeed, they’re not going to. Because they don’t exist. … This is at the root of what got ACORN in trouble. They were often sloppy and hired people who weren’t reliable. But most of the “fraud” uncovered in their work were fraudulent registrations they themselves discovered when they reviewed the forms and then reported to authorities.

Basically, low-level people in a voter-registration drive sometimes fake registrations to make it look like they’re doing a good job. It doesn’t affect elections at all.

So while this incident does point out how easy voter-registration fraud is, it doesn’t support the Republican claim that voter fraud is common.

Homer Simpson is a late-breaking undecided voter who goes for Romney: Obama “promised me death panels, and Grampa’s still alive.”

A manifesto for the job creators: “I am entitled to provide political support to radical, uncompromising politicians and then complain about how dysfunctional Washington has become.”

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

The Romney Pre-mortems

October 1, 2012 – 12:12 pm

Post-mortems on the Romney campaign are like Christmas catalogs. It’s way too early, but here they are. Waiting for a guy to actually lose before you explain why he lost is so old-fashioned.

Remember those articles about where the 2007-2008 Patriots rank among the all-time great teams? (Somewhere behind the 2007-2008 Giants, apparently.) I don’t know what makes this kind of premature speculation so irresistible, but it is.

Republicans thought this was the year they couldn’t lose. Unemployment was high, the deficit was high, ObamaCare was unpopular, and the same wave of public discontent that had given Republicans a sweep in 2010 would win them the White House in 2012. As a bonus, their new House majority that could keep Obama from getting anything done, and — even better! — shoot the economy in the foot by provoking a debt-ceiling standoff. See what a lousy president Obama is? The country’s credit rating went south on his watch!

So the dialog during the Republican primaries went like this. Tea Party types would say, “We don’t like Romney. He’s not really one of us.” And saner Republicans would answer: “Don’t screw this up by nominating somebody scary like Bachmann or Santorum. Just play it cool and we’ve got this in the bag.”

Suddenly it’s out of the bag. Obama’s approval rating is positive again. He leads Romney in every major poll, and Nate Silver’s polling model puts the odds of an Obama victory over 85% (98% if the election were held today). Now it’s starting to look like Democrats could hold the Senate and may even recapture the House.

Somebody’s got to take the blame for that, even if it hasn’t happened yet.

So the race is on to establish the definitive why-Romney-will-have-lost scenario. (If I remember my grammar, that’s the future perfect tense.)

Some have been quick to jump on the Romney’s-a-bad-candidate explanation. And indeed, he has failed to articulate any message more positive than “I’m not Obama.” (It was sad this weekend when even Fox News pressed Paul Ryan for details on the Romney tax plan, only to be told, “It would take me too long to go through all the math.”) The 47% video has turned out to be hugely damaging, not because it was that much worse than a lot of other things Romney has done, but because it so precisely confirmed what voters were already afraid of: Romney isn’t just rich, he holds the rest of us in contempt.

David Brooks has compared Romney to Thurston Howell, the out-of-touch millionaire from Gilligan’s Island. Peggy Noonan called his campaign a “rolling calamity“. All of which annoys RedState.com’s Erick Erickson to no end, because he blames the Brooks/Noonan Republicans for foisting Romney on the Party to begin with:

The staggering irony is that those of us who did not want Romney are now the ones defending him to the hilt while the elitist jerks are distancing themselves from Romney as quickly as possible — both upset at what their media friends tell them is to come and upset that Mitt Romney might not actually listen to their sweet whispers as much as they originally presumed.

But that leads to the question: Who should have been the nominee? Santorum? Herman Cain? Kevin Drum lays it on the line:

Romney was the best they had. The very best. Let that sink in for a bit.

Or maybe the problem is Paul Ryan. With Obama’s lead among younger voters, Romney had to carry the elderly. Ryan’s Medicare-voucher plan scared them.

Other observers blame the Republican base, (i.e., people like Erickson) for creating an environment where no Republican could win: To get through the primaries, any candidate would have to take positions that would make them unelectable in the general election. Robert Reich put it best:

Romney’s failing isn’t that he’s a bad candidate. To the contrary, he’s giving this GOP exactly what it wants in a candidate. And that’s exactly the problem for Romney — as it is for every other Republican candidate — because what the GOP wants is not at all what the rest of America wants.

National Review takes a longer, more philosophical perspective: The problem is “the shadow of the George W. Bush years.” As frustrating as it is to Republicans that people still blame Bush more than Obama for the bad economy, the party still hasn’t figured out what it should learn from the Bush era.

Romney’s silence about the errors of the Bush years is, on the other hand, understandable, since many Republicans continue to hold Bush in high esteem as a good man who tried to do a lot of good things. Since most Americans consider Bush a failure, Romney cannot embrace him either. So Bush has been an awkward non-presence in the campaign: the man who was not there.

Democrats kept running against Herbert Hoover until the generation that remembered him died off. W will suffer the same fate until Republicans come up with a definitive critique of Bush and some new non-Bush policies.

With the base still not willing to deal with their Bush mistake, Mitt had only two choices, says Steve Kornacki:

He can run on the House’s far-right agenda, which is a product of conservatives’ mistaken conviction that Bush failed because he wasn’t enough of an ideologue; or, recognizing how politically poisonous the House GOP’s vision is with general election voters, he can try to steer clear of it and hope voters are just blindly angry at Obama, like they were in ’10.

Romney has mostly chosen the second option, and while the evidence is mounting that it’s not working, you can hardly blame him for trying. The alternative is much worse.

As I indicated at the beginning, why-Romney-will-have-lost is a ridiculous game to be playing. Early voting has just started. Everyone who cares should just go all-out for their candidate and see what happens. It’s not like the why-Mitt-lost argument will be over by Election Day.

But … it’s so irresistible for any political junkie. I have to play. So here’s my thinking: At its root these days, the conservative movement is based on myths rather than facts. And the biggest myth of all is: conservatism is popular.

In conservative mythology, all real Americans are conservatives — unless they’ve been bamboozled by the liberal media or cowed by false accusations of racism or corrupted into dependency on government programs.

So if conservatives lose elections, there can only be a few explanations: voter fraud or the personal failings of a candidate or the media being “in the tank” for liberals. Otherwise, the problem was that the candidate just wasn’t conservative enough. He wasn’t a true believer. He didn’t put forward the full force of conservatism’s case.

The real explanation for Romney’s troubles is that conservatism just isn’t popular. He looked electable when he looked fuzzy — maybe he was a conservative, maybe he was a moderate. Remember his governorship in Massachusetts?

But the base couldn’t stand that fuzziness and Romney couldn’t win without them, so he was forced to define himself more and more as a conservative. Paul Ryan sealed the deal.

Republicans need to get their moderates back. They can continue to hold conservative ideals, but they need to reassure the country that they can compromise and be part of a governing coalition, as Reagan was. Right now that’s not true. Until it is, their national candidates will be in trouble.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Sorry, Jill: I’m not voting Green

October 1, 2012 – 9:41 am

You don’t have to have read a lot of Weekly Sift articles to figure out that I’m voting for Obama. Last week I put together the positive case for why he deserves a second term, and I have been a relentless critic of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Republican Party in general, and conservatism as a movement.

So when I take the “I Side With” quiz, I should come out as an Obama voter, right? Well, not exactly:

Jill Stein: 96%
Barack Obama: 88%
Mitt Romney 6%

Philosophically, I’m more Green than Democratic. Some of that 12% disagreement with Obama is pretty important stuff: I’d rather have a single-payer system than ObamaCare. I wish we’d start rolling back our military commitments and cutting defense spending. (I still want us to be the strongest country in the world, I just don’t think we need to be stronger than the next five or six countries put together.) I think we should only blow up things in countries we’re at war with.

Most of all (and I’ve been bitching about this since the Bush administration) I don’t believe in the National Security State. I believe in the Fourth Amendment, the one that says the government needs a warrant to search your stuff; and I think the wording of that amendment is sweeping enough (“persons, houses, papers, and effects” constituted everything the Founders could think of that the government might want to search.) that “stuff” includes your cellphone calls, your email, your library records, and just about anything else you would rather keep private.

I think torture isn’t just bad policy, it’s a war crime that should be prosecuted from the torturer to the policy-maker, and everyone in between. And I don’t care if some American citizen has been hanging around with jihadists, as long as he’s not physically pointing a weapon at somebody at the moment, you can’t legally kill him without due process of law. And by definition, due process of law can’t take place entirely inside the executive branch.

So: Obama voter, yes. Totally happy camper, no.

People like me must frustrate the heck out of Jill Stein. “What do I have to say?” I imagine her asking.

But here’s the problem: my 6% agreement with Mitt Romney.

George Wallace used to say there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties. And when he said it, it was almost true. My first presidential vote went to Gene McCarthy in 1976 — me and 740,000 other people. Jimmy Carter was running against Jerry Ford that year, and you’ll never convince me that the future of the Republic hung in the balance.

If the Republicans had nominated some 2012 equivalent of Jerry Ford, I’d probably vote for Jill.

In 2000, a lot of people (but not me) thought Bush Jr. was Bush Sr. with a more convincing Texas accent. If that had been true, voting for Ralph Nader might have made some sense.

If the Republicans had nominated some 2012 equivalent of Bush Sr., I might vote for Jill.

I didn’t vote for Nader in 2000. If I had, I would still feel guilty about it. Florida got all the attention that year, but if the Nader voters in my state of New Hampshire had voted for Gore, Gore would have been president.

Nobody can say for sure in what ways history would be different, but I’ll propose two: We wouldn’t have wasted 4000 lives and a trillion dollars in Iraq, and we would be doing something about global warming.

So that’s another way in which I’m green: with envy for that alternate timeline.

This year, the Republican Party didn’t nominate Jerry Ford or George H. W. Bush, they nominated Mitt Romney.

Some people will tell you that at his core, Mitt Romney is a moderate, like Ford or Bush Sr. They point to his record as governor of Massachusetts, and how unconvincing he sounds mouthing extreme-right rhetoric.

But I don’t believe Mitt Romney has a core. I think he’s the very model of a modern corporate CEO: he says and does whatever it takes to complete the deal.

As a Republican candidate, he has needed to take extreme-right positions: for personhood laws that would outlaw the Pill, for “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants, for doing nothing about global warming, for disenfranchising marginal voters, for extreme cuts to Medicaid, massive defense spending increases, and now we find out that his chosen advisers want to bring back “enhanced interrogation”.

Whether Romney actually believes any of that stuff is irrelevant. He needs to take those positions, so he does. McDonalds doesn’t “believe” in apple pockets or fish sandwiches, but if they’ll sell, they’re on the menu.

After he becomes president, his “core beliefs” will still be irrelevant. He’ll need extreme-right support to be renominated, and he’ll court it just as he courts it now. So yes, he really will try to carry out that benighted stuff he has proposed in the campaign. And he certainly won’t veto anything that comes out of a far-right Republican Congress.

And if he does … well, Paul Ryan is a true believer and he’s just a bullet away. I doubt I’m the only person who’s thought of that.

So don’t give me the it-makes-no-difference argument. It makes a huge difference. I agree 88% with Obama and 6% with Romney.

Where I sympathize with Stein supporters is in their criticism of the two-party system, which is failing to give us the choices we should be debating. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last week, we aren’t having a public discussion about the Afghan War or about drone strikes. And how do you express your desire for single-payer health care if you limit yourself to Republicans or Democrats?

In the general election, you don’t. The place for that debate is in the primaries. If you don’t think that works, ask Republican senators like Richard Lugar, who lost his job for being too moderate, or Orrin Hatch, who took a hard right turn to hang on. Primary challenges could work on the left, too, if we built a constituency for progressive policies.

And progressives need to face up to this reality: A progressive candidate who can’t win a Democratic primary has no chance in a general election. Reforming one of the two parties is far easier than winning and governing as a third party. (Ask the Reagan Republicans.)

More generally, you need to ask whether we still want a two-party system. I’d say no. But the way to get that result is to make common cause with right-wingers around some change to the voting system, like instant-runoff voting or approval voting. Splitting the left-of-center vote is just going to get us right-wing rule.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

October 1, 2012 – 8:33 am

I’m still in the Midwest and working out of coffee shops, so the Sift may come out a little slowly this week.

I’m following up last week’s Obama’s Positive Case with Sorry Jill, I’m Not Voting Green. When I do the “I Side With” quiz, it matches me with Green candidate Jill Stein. But as much as I appreciate the positions Stein takes on the issues — single-payer health care, no drone strikes unless we’re at war — I still tremble at the spectre of Bush vs. Gore.

That’s the article that’s closest to finished right now, so it should go up first.

The other article this week will be The Romney Pre-mortems. I have to laugh at the general impatience of our age; we can’t even wait for a guy to lose before we start analyzing why he lost. But once that game gets started, it is strangely irresistible, and I end up playing it too.

I haven’t figured out whether it needs its own article or will fit in the weekly summary, but there are a bunch of fairly simple why-questions about the campaign that aren’t getting the simple answers they deserve: Why (other than the fact that Romney’s losing) do Republicans say the polls are skewed? Why does Obama say Romney will raise middle-class taxes and Romney deny it? And so on.

This week’s quote, about the shrinking efficacy of American politics, is from Rachel Maddow, who has been on a tear lately about all the issues that aren’t getting debated in the campaign.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)