The False God of Business

Rick Scott, our corporate-criminal governor here in sunny Florida, has said he wants the state’s colleges and universities to run more like businesses. This is a disease that is spreading to public education around the country.

I think this view would make Thomas Jefferson retch. So would being in the same room with Rick Scott.

Scott wants to charge less tuition for majors that prepare kids for jobs the economy needs now — engineering, technology, health care. On the surface it’s an intriguing idea. But it reduces education to job training, to providing work-units for business moguls.

If students have to pay more for a history degree than a biology degree, fewer will study history. Or English. Or philosophy. Or government. “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe,” Jefferson said. He believed that, as political storms blew the country from right to left and back again, an informed electorate would be the safeguard against extremism and tyranny. He believed American democracy would only work if citizens were educated and aware.

If we treat higher education as just job training, how will we develop an informed citizenry? How will people learn how to think critically, to separate political lies from the record of facts, to understand how our government and our world work?

There may not be a capital market for citizenship, but without citizenship this country will become just market segments for ad buyers.

Scott, as CEO of healthcare giant Columbia HCA, ran a company that defrauded the federal government (which means all of us, the taxpayers) by swindling Medicare, resulting in a $1.7 billion fine. Scott made out just fine though — when the HCA board dumped him because of the fraud, they gave him a $10 million severance package and $300 million in stock. No wonder he wants to run state government like he ran a business. And no wonder Mitt Romney, who made millions by, in many cases, leveraging companies into bankruptcy and stripping and shipping out jobs, thought business was a great model for government. Business is a fine game for the winners.

Didn’t a majority of American voters just spurn a businessman’s pitch to treat this country like a business? A majority of voters decided that business’s main goal of funneling profits to the tiny group of Romneyfolk who already have most of the wealth isn’t a good governing principle for the majority of us.

President Obama pointed out that, running a government, he has to think of all the people; those running a business have to think only of some.

Should the Grand Canyon or the Everglades be run more like a business? Should a sunset? The human body? A marriage? Diplomatic relations with another country? Poetry? Absolutely; poetry should be run more like business. And so should the wonder of a playful kitten. And one’s youth — that should surely be run more like a business.

Cretin. Philistine.

— Bruce Benidt

Bad info-tainment begets low information voters.

Ever since the right-wing entertainment bubble began expanding back in the early 1990s, I’ve wondered what it would take to pop it. Despite sharp, specific criticism from apostates like David Frum and others, I doubt this year’s ass-kicking will flush the misbegotten authority of self-interested hucksters from modern conservatives’ primary information conduits. The world outside the bubble of crazy-assed nonsense doesn’t have enough martial conflict.

The phenomena of “the conservative entertainment complex” has fascinated/obsessed me for years. Locally, I covered, got to know (and on some levels enjoyed) people like Jason Lewis and Bob Davis. And hell, “RINO” Sarah Janecek and I were, briefly, placeholders at a Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel station while it tried to lure Lewis back to town. (Officially we were there to offer a “new balance in political talk radio”, unofficially it was understood from the get-go we were toast as soon as Lewis signed.)

I’ve been face to face with national consultants explaining how the talk radio game works, ratings-wise. (Essentially; feed your average 40-something male just enough to let them have an opinion in an argument at work.) I’ve listened to station managers encouraging me to, “play back” and “let them win”, in terms of an ideal commercial model for a left v. right radio “debate”. I fielded hundreds of calls from obsessive, low-information listeners absolutely convinced of everything Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the usual characters had told them — about WMDs in Iraq, about “overtopped” levees in New Orleans, about … well, you get the idea.

Point being, I get the knucklehead factor. There are plenty of people out there who either don’t know much, or who desperately want people around them to believe they know a lot more than they actually do. Those people — predominantly white, male and middle-age to elderly  — are a highly exploitable demographic. By themselves they are enough to keep the hosts — the entertainers — in a nice living, even if, they add up to barely 10% of the population. More to the point, the hosts of these anger-stoking shows are actually in a better position in defeat, when they can level the full force of their invective at the opponents in the White House. Their message is founded on victimhood.

Post-election, what is astonishing — even to me — is that by all reports very highly paid operatives and consultants … and … the GOP’s two top candidates were also huffing the very thin air on “Bullshit Mountain”, as Jon Stewart calls it.

Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan claim to have been gobsmacked by the results. Are you kidding me?

The only way that happens is if they too dialed out “the reality based” world and invested their grandest ambitions and hundreds of millions in wealthy donor money in the alternate universe of conservative entertainment logic. That universe is a zone out beyond the Oort Cloud where among other things, Donald Trump was briefly a viable presidential contender, where anything Sarah Palin says is worth hearing, where women who want birth control through their health plans are “sluts”, where Barack Obama is still a Muslim, where Dick Morris has a regular audience, where “death panels” will decide Grandma’s fate, where Socialism is swamping capitalism in 21st century America, where climate change is a liberal hoax, where the simple math of poll aggregation matters less than anything cherry-picked off Rasmussen or phoned in to Laura Ingraham’s radio show and where the attack on the consulate Benghazi has spawned a cover-up as big as Watergate.

It’s a message that appeals most to an aging, anachronistic slice of the population … that happens to sustain a small class of entertainers (and their corporate shareholders).

At the moment it appears the conventional wisdom among the modern GOP’s intelligentsia is that every office seeker in the next election cycle must wear a sombrero and mutter a few lines of Spanish. Never mind creating substantially improved policies instead of vague verbiage. Such a revolution — which is what is needed —  would require risking the wrath of the lords of the entertainment complex. Almost no one has shown the guts to do that. Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, currently refuting Romney’s claim that “gifts” to minorities swayed the election, will be an interesting test case for whether any Republican can maintain viability while out of step with Rush Limbaugh.

I meant to post a couple of post-election appearances — by yours truly —  before this.

Here’s your fourth-favorite Rowdy on Fox 9. And here’s the same seer on Christopher Gabriel’s show on WDAY radio up in Fargo. Bon appetit.

I’m not sure what went on with the Tea Party this campaign season. I think I’ve said before that if that “movement” had any true ideological fervor beyond beating the illegitimate black guy in the White House it would have parted ways with the GOP establishment the minute Rick Santorum conceded the last primary. Lovers of good conspiracy theories would like to know if any SuperPAC money was sprinkled around to the myriad Tea Party insurgencies to shut up and play along with Romney’s adventure? How else do they explain not exploiting their moment in the (pale) sunlight and running their own candidate?

But, bottom line, I fail to see how the GOP — truly, a “Mad Men” party in a “Modern Family” world — reestablishes broad-based appeal to minorities of any kind and women under the age of 65, not to mention people young enough to regard Jay-Z as a role model and not Ted Nugent or Pat Boone.

For those groups and everyone who has come to regard the party’s supplicant status to the “entertainment complex” as a kind of pathetic, sick joke there simply is no “there” to the much-parroted modern conservative message.

What does “limited government” mean in, you know, the real world?

What are you actually talking about when you campaign on “economic freedom” Who doesn’t want that?

Ditto “respect for social institutions” like the family. Does anyone believe the average Democrat is trying to undermine Mom, Dad and Thanksgiving dinner?

And “respect for national defense and law enforcement”? Just because your average wild-eyed liberal thinks the Pentagon is a sacred cow never to be challenged on waste, fraud and cronyism doesn’t mean we’re in favor of letting terrorists take over the New York Stock Exchange. (Hell, most of the worst economic terrorists are already working a couple blocks away.)

This election tore back the curtain on the buffoonery of the modern conservative information machine. But until the movement’s high priests on radio and TV — the crowd motivating their caucus and primary-goers —  are cancelled for lousy ratings, I don’t see any way the party can change.

Not that I’m complaining, you understand.

In the Light of the Morning After …

A few comments and questions on the morning after …

A: The “fight for the soul of the Republican party” requires that sober-minded pragmatists within the party have the guts to stand up to their radical, alienating insurgent wing. With two more Tea Party-driven losses in the Senate, (in Indiana and Missouri), common sense would suggest that the far … far … right should instantly and wholly lose credibility among the party’s “more moderate” leadership and major donors. But … unless the party somehow reworks its primary system and simultaneously de-legitimizes the influence of that wing’s primary thought-shapers — rich-as-Croesus evangelical ministries, talk radio and FoxNews — what few moderates there are will continue to live in fear of torpedoing their own careers if they don’t continue to pander to their party’s least-productive elements. Hell, even Mitch McConnell is worrying about a primary challenge from someone far to the right of him. Even this morning I’m getting e-mail from Tea Party groups arguing — predictably — that Romney, like Bob Dole and John McCain lost because “only real conservatives get elected”.

B: This fundamental strategic problem is umbilically-linked to the party’s lack of appeal among women and minorities, especially “illegals” as so many of them like to describe Hispanics, a group closing in on 20% of the population. What “soul-saver” among viable Republicans dares run with a message of protecting a woman’s individual rights AND compassionate immigration reform? Maybe Marco Rubio on the latter. (A favorite factoid from the last days of the campaign: Had Romney drawn George W. Bush’s numbers among Latinos, he’d have won several swing states.)

C: Barack Obama’s support among white women was the mirror image of his (lack of) support among white men. To which I ask, “How has the experience of white women been so much different/better with Obama — or black men — than that of white males?” My wife argues it’s because women, despite being 52% of the electorate still regard themselves as a minority, certainly in terms of holding political power. I suspect women are far less threatened by a black leader than white men.

D: The Catholic church did itself serious moral damage with its medieval-zealot push on the gay marriage amendment here and around the country. Coupled with the taint of evangelical “craziness” throughout the GOP primaries — and that irrationality’s effect on Romney’s credibility — the drift away from organized religion in this country will probably accelerate.

E:  In terms of 11th hour factors, Romney’s flagrant lies about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China had far more impact on “freezing his momentum” than superstorm Sandy. Moreover, had he wanted to counter the President’s leaderly posture overseeing disaster relief he could have written a personal check of several million dollars to the Red Cross, or coordinated with Karl Rove and other allies to do the same, rather than burning off excess cash on advertising in states where he had no chance in hell — like Minnesota. If you are as rich as Romney, the average guy/gal assumes you’ll step up when things get really bad. I doubt it even crossed his mind.

F: We have entered a new era in political polling, or at least the aggregation/collated end of polling. It is eery how accurate the “Nate Silver model” was last night. And this will only improve.

G: Post-victory and across the pundit spectrum this morning the sage counsel is that “the President must reach across the aisle”. As though he and he alone must “seek compromise”. Recognition of the 1000-pound gorilla presence of the GOP’s far-right insurgency is still not considered “balanced” among the vast majority of mainstream commentators. Good luck accurately reporting the story of the next two months if that’s your default ethic.

H: Finally — for now — the public appetite for a female presidential candidate in 2016 is palpable. I somehow doubt the GOP’s highest profile women — Michele Bachmann — have anything remotely approaching the broad-based appeal of Hillary Clinton (whose popularity has never been as high, but who may decide her time has passed) or freshly-elected Elizabeth Warren.

That said, I’m one happy guy today. And my prediction of a 1.5% popular/ “just under 300” electoral vote win for Obama was a pretty good B+ as calls go.

You Pays Your Money and You Makes Your Bets…

So…here it is.  Some people must feel this way anticipating the Super Bowl or the World Cup.  For me, it’s election night.

I’ll fire up the televisions that haven’t been out of their boxes in four years.  Connect the projector to one of the computers.  Since 2008, iPads have been added to the mix and there will be plenty of those lying around as well.

The fun will start early:

We should start seeing things by 6:00 pm (7:00 pm EST).  I suspect we won’t KNOW who wins, however, until sometime on Wednesday if then.  There’s a fair number of chances for recounts, lawsuits, etc. In fact, the post-election period promises to be almost as contentious as the fall campaign season has been.

As to who will win, I’m going with Obama.  No surprise there, of course, but – if you believe the polls – the conclusion is inescapable.  I very much agree with Nate Silver’s fact-based, logical analysis of the race.  If he’s wrong, then what you’ll see tomorrow is a true 1-in-8 longshot coming in. Not to say it doesn’t happen, it simply seems very unlikely at this point.

Here’s my bets:

Obama/Romney:  290-248 electoral votes, 50.1-48.9 popular vote.

Bellwethers: if they call Virginia or Florida or New Hampshire early for anybody, those are important indications of direction.  If Pennsylvania is too close to call for a long while (or goes for Romney) it’s a bad night for Obama.  If North Carolina stays uncalled, it’s a bad sign for Romney.

In the Midwest, we’re watching who gets Iowa.  In the mountain states, it’s Colorado.

Senate: Democrats retain a majority.  Maybe one party or the other picks up a seat, but the overall majority remains Democratic.  Warren wins in Massachusetts, McCaskill wins in Missouri, Donnelly wins in Indiana.  Here’s a good blow-by-blow if you’re interested.

House:  The GOP keeps the House, probably at roughly the same numbers.  Again, a good overview is here.

In other words, if my predictions are right, on Wednesday morning – assuming we’re done counting – the balance of power at the federal level will look a lot like it does now.

Here in the Land O’ Lakes, Senator Klobuchar wins by 30 points, maybe more.  Rick Nolan will make Chip Cravaack a one-term Congressman and we’ll still have Michelle Bachmann to embarrass us on the national stage as I expect Jim Graves’ challenge to fall short (but maybe not by much).  No changes in the rest of the Congressional delegation.  The marriage amendment fails and the voter ID amendment passes, but the latter will be much closer than polls have shown.

I don’t have a feel for the legislative races, but smarter people than me seem to think the Dems have a chance to reclaim the Senate majority.  I’ll go with that.

OK, that’s my predictions…what are yours?

– Austin

Mitt, for God’s Sake, the Flop Sweat … .

I don’t know why I thought the final hours might be different — better — than Mitt Romney’s previous six years of campaigning, but they’re not. They’re worse.

As the man prepares to draw the closing curtain on one of most disgraceful campaigns of the modern era, rather than summoning some reservoir of moral courage and leaving the stage with a semblance of self respect, Romney has gone out of his way to remind everyone who despises him, alleged political allies and half the voting public, that he really is someone incapable of the common decency of personal dignity.

Four years ago, John McCain ran a campaign that was, put simply, inept. The fundamental factor between him and Barack Obama was judgment, and McCain blew his feet off with the choice of Sarah Palin. He then traumatized the stumps with his confused, tremulous response to the financial collapse. But McCain at least had a reservoir of good will to draw down. For a time, on the Straight Talk Express, he was confident enough in his own thinking and brave enough to take flak to say what he was actually thinking.

Romney, on the other hand, isn’t a man anyone other than his own family appears to like, and he doesn’t have the confidence or courage to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show much less allow himself to take questions from an actual reporter. And now …

… after the truly painful-to-behold ads about Chrysler moving “all” Jeep production to China, (an assertion more flagrant for its desperation than its dishonesty)

… after getting slapped down by top executives from both Chrysler and GM,

… after his repeated non-response to his current thinking on FEMA, (which he said should be privatized),

… after that pathetic, bogus “storm relief” rally in Ohio

… and now after weekend full of talk about Obama seeking “revenge”, Romney has only 72 hours to promise everyone a pony, accuse Obama of conspiring with Mullah Omar to impose Sharia law, or take a bungee dive off Trump Tower in his magic underwear.

At this point he’s done and said everything else dishonest and absurd.

I’m not one of those who sees Chris Christie going over-the-top effusive in compliments for Barack Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg specifically mentioning Romney’s indifference to science and George W. Bush suddenly popping up at an investors conference in the Cayman Islands as happenstance.

Guys like that always calculate.

Christie needs federal help bad to save his career in New Jersey. But he didn’t have to go on … and on … like he did to keep FEMA focused. He knows Romney is a lost cause, and, I (very) strongly suspect he isn’t all that broken up about it. Sure 2016 looks like a cleaner shot with no Romney incumbency. But Christie, the uber Springsteen fan, prides himself in having a moral core, being loyal to the place he grew up and saying what he thinks. How much of ethical vacuum like Mitt Romney can a guy like that take before saying, “I’ve done enough for this team”?

Likewise, it may be years before we know what Bloomberg, the quintessential high finance politician, thinks of a guy who you and I imagine as a kind of peer-in-arms. But Bloomberg made a fat chunk of his dough in the news/media business, where reporting and interpreting reality is an essential virtue, not something to be ignored and distorted at will.

And then there was the business with Bain Capital and Delphi, the big auto parts supplier. A vulture move if there ever was one, but one that really begins to curdle in the wake of Romney’s revolving campaign duplicities.

As for George W., aka The Man Who No Republican Dares Ever Mention , several pundits thought it exceedingly curious that he would leave whatever gilded bunker he’s been in and show up … in The Cayman freakin’ Islands … practically dragging a banner behind his Gulfstream reminding voters that Mitt Romney’s entire fortune is based on slippery-to-sleazy and defiantly opaque tax manipulations.

Will anyone in the Bush family be all that sorry to see Romney defeated? Jeb’s options, such as they are considering intense, lingering Bush fatigue, are certainly brighter with no Romney to deal with.

The post-mortem on the Romney campaign will be far more interesting, and potentially illuminating, than McCain’s. Romney, a product of a highly insular “prosperity”-driven religious sect, with primary loyalties to its own kind, and an implicit discursiveness, bordering on misanthropic disdain for “others”, embodied almost nothing most Americans could relate to or admire… except of course that he wasn’t Barack Obama.

O-H-I-O. Not Just a Song By the Pretenders. Or CSNY.

Long-time readers of this blog – all two of you – might remember that in 2008 I was posting a lot in terms election prognosticating.  I haven’t done nearly so much this year.  Part of the difference is that I’ve been flat-out busy the last month or so with paying work and the other part is that I’ve concluded there’s almost zero value I can add to a discussion on this topic.  Everybody I know checks Nate Silver every morning (and afternoon and evening) along with Real Clear Politics, Votamatics and the other sites that aggregate, evaluate and weigh polling data.  What was once the purview of high-priced consultants and their client campaigns is now available to all of us for the price of a mouse click.

As of this morning, Silver is making the following predictions:

 

“Vision” and “leadership” with neither clarity or courage.

By the quaint standards of the “reality based” community, Barack Obama “won” last night’s debate handily. He offered a serious, nuanced view of how foreign policy works with ideological zealots like Iran — (News flash: It’s a wee bit more complicated than “projecting strength” or buying more boats for the Navy). But command of nuanced reality isn’t what matters in politics.

Mitt Romney’s people are sounding quite pleased that their guy once again avoided damage. And he did it as he always has, by maintaining a nearly completely opaque wall around what he would actually do about any of the serious problems of our times. … other than “keeping America strong and confident and creating 12 million new jobs” … details to follow … maybe … talk to my scheduling secretary.

Thanks to the heavily negotiated/litigated rules for these debates (and for the moderators), the mano a mano phase of the campaign has ended with no discussion at all of social issues, like abortion, the Republican machine’s anti-gay marriage and Voter ID initiatives and … oh, yeah … climate change. The latter of which might have some very serious impacts on “foreign policy” in the not at all distant future.

I’m certain that if Romney had been asked what he would do about carbon emissions he would have assured us that he has a “vision” to act with clarity, authority and strong leadership … without ever actually being clear, or demonstrating any kind of authoritative grasp of the subject matter and therefore betraying a profound lack of personal courage, a principal asset of leadership.

The fact there is a debate designated solely to foreign policy is because earnest thinkers believe presidents are never more presidential than when managing international conflicts and crises. This plays in the face of the fact that your average persuadable voter is far more interested in which guy will put more money in his pocket, and probably knows so little about international geography he thinks Iran and Syria share a common border. With that in mind the Romney strategy of avoiding mistakes — by again saying nothing and revealing nothing while suggesting something strong and leader-ly — pretty well satisfied their campaign needs for another night.

Since Obama clearly demonstrated both a willingness to debate the interlocking mechanics of foreign policy and remind voters of how he’s already pulled that off, I won’t bore you with a lot of moderator-bashing. Except to say … veteran journalist Bob Schieffer seemed content to play clock keeper and wallpaper. Schieffer knows enough about the nitty-gritty of foreign policy to have interjected a much deserved “and how, exactly … ” a couple dozen times last night. But as I say, his role has been negotiated down to an edge-less nub by strategists for the two campaigns.

My newest brain storm:  A channel that runs the debates on a five-minute delay with “real-time” fact-checking for your average “apology tour” and “private credit was available to GM” moments. That gimmick would have spared the crowd at our debate party last night a lot of spontaneous profanity. (I hope the friend of our friend from St. Paul wasn’t horrified when a scene from “Casino” broke out … three or four times.)

Barring an October surprise from one of the GOP’s leading intellectual lights — like Donald Trump — my prediction is Obama will win by something around 1.5% and a bit less than 300 electoral votes.

But as a kind of horror movie thought experiment consider the psycho-dynamics of a Romney presidency.

In George W.Bush liberals like myself saw a guy manifestly unequipped to be President of the United States. Intellectually lazy, glib to a fault, dismissive of any countering logic, content to be steered by authority figures out of a past generation and incapable of serious reflection and self-criticism. … but affable. A guy you probably would have a beer with. (Dick Cheney … well, only if I could slip sodium pentothal into his mug.) And all our original fears were born out in a genuinely disastrous administration. It was an eight year-run of reckless foreign adventurism and profligate spending that will require another 10 years of repair to set right … assuming we don’t reignite it.

But Bush had friends when he arrived in the White House. Not those who egged his limo on the way to the inauguration, but within his party. People who liked him, personally. Does Mitt Romney?

Based on the primary season I think we can conclude that Romney is despised nearly as much by his own party as a Democrats and liberals. His insular, highly deceptive “leadership style” has quite thoroughly infuriated his own party, and liberals, again judging from my contacts and the venom thrown at his image last night, deeply, genuinely and with multiple valid reasons hold him in utter contempt. I have to go back to Richard Nixon for a candidate whose personal ethic I find as loathsome as Mitt Romney’s.

And that would be his situation at the start … widespread contempt and deep mistrust, with abundant good reason —  before the first shell is lobbed in the political wars. And well before he could commence his vision to “bring America together” … through strength and clarity and leadership … details to follow.

Dear Barack: Follow the Money.

Barack Obama has been getting plenty of advice since that debate in Denver. Here’s mine, prior to tomorrow on Long Island. “Follow the money”. It’s an old maxim of journalism and it rarely leads you wrong.

Most basically, this is a variation on the adage that “if you’re not playing offense, you’re playing defense.” By zeroing in on money — who makes it now, who doesn’t, and where and how the Romney-Ryan money “plan” (sic) shifts any of those equations — is unquestionably the best line of attack on the Republicans’ central thesis. Which is: that they are better stewards of the economy than any liberal at any time and especially Barack Obama.

Definitive studies long ago proved otherwise. And otherwise. And otherwise. And so on.

While Joe Biden played offense better than the boss, in his debate with Paul Ryan, it was still exasperating to watch Ryan’s treadworn assertion that he was bringing “new ideas” to the table pass without a well-deserved smile, guffaw or spit-take. While moderator Martha Raddatz did at least press Ryan on whether he “actually had a plan”, the better response for Biden, and Obama tomorrow is to slap down the gauzy wall of “technic-y” sounding econo-babble, serious-sounding but vacuous noise designed to impress and amaze everyone who needs a graph to calculate their savings at a 50% off sale. The reality is that Ryan-speak is eye-rolling, used car lot chicanery to everyone who finally wised up to the reality that the Bush tax cuts, themselves a repeat of deficit-busting Reaganomics, did nothing for job creation or the wealth enhancement of the middle class.

And the Reagan-W* economic “miracle” (god help you if you’re not a hedge fund partner)  is all the Romney-Ryan (or Ryan-to-Romney) money scheme is, buffed up by a P90X work-out and no shortage of narcissistic delusion.

Point being, there is nothing older than a strategy to control government built around guarding the access and assets of the already enfranchised.

Obama is also encouraged to display exasperation with the patently and demonstrably false assertions that:

“The stimulus failed.”

“Obamacare will add trillions to the deficit“.

“Green pork [renewable energy] is a worse bet than established energy conglomerates with more lobbying power.”

“Eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the top-tier is harmful (primarily) to small businesses.”

“Bain Capital created jobs and is therefore a model for the economy as a whole.”

… and on and on, with particular, disdainful emphasis reserved for the biggest canard of all, namely that the Bush tax cuts created jobs the last time we tried this same, very old idea.

Philosophically — the tone Obama enjoys most — the argument can be reduced to this:

“Despite all their hyperventilating about government spending and debt, neither the Governor or his running mate, who is supposed to be the braintrust of their economic thinking, can actually show how this grand scheme of their’s either reduces debt, most which was created after the Bush tax cuts of 2003, or avoids further penalizing the middle class. If they could don’t you think they’d take advantage of a TV audience of 70 million to make certain everyone understood what they were selling? But they can’t because what they’re selling has no intellectual basis other than as a sales pitch for your vote.

“And you know, I was very impressed with the Governor’s famous “47%” speech to those wealthy donors down in Florida. I thought it was remarkably candid of him, and I congratulate him for that refreshing breath of honesty. But what he should have reminded those millionaires and billionaires is that they too are “dependent on government” in that so much of their wealth is built on controlling how government responds to their needs, how it does or doesn’t tax them, how they gain unique access to government for lucrative contracts and so on. The Governor’s friends very much depend on government to keep them as wealthy as the are.

“Fundamentally every election, especially presidential elections, come down to who government is going to serve most — who is gets to be most “dependent”on government decisions. My argument is that the economy will fare best if the middle-class, the “customer class” has wealth restored that has drained away in the past generation. More customers will create more jobs faster than more tax cuts for a leverage buy out partner already living like king thanks to a 15% tax rate.”

It really is that simple.

Freaked Out? Good.

To tell you the truth, the liberal freak-out over Obama’s “debate disaster” is a good thing. The complacency that was palpable two weeks ago is gone and everyone horrified at the thought of Mitt Romney essentially reigniting a third term of deficit-busting, laissez-faire Bush-o-nomics and multi-trillion dollar international pratfalls is reminding friends and neighbors that the ability to flat-out lie in front of 70 million people is not the primary virtue of an effective president. (One of, sadly, but not the first.)

Post Romney “surge”more liberals will vote than before.

The best description of the lefty meltdown I’ve heard since Oct. 3 came from David Weigel, who compared the reaction to the “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”, the first in the third set of sequels from George Lucas.

Said Weigel in his Slate post: “Democrats walked out of the theater/turned off the TV saying ‘huh, well, I wanted it to be better’. After a few days of talking to friends, it changes from a disappointment into the worst piece of crap in human history.” That’s about right.

Or, as E.J. Dionne remarked, “When you give conservatives bad news in your polls, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad news in your polls, they want to kill themselves.”

As I said last time, all debates require showmanship, the willingness and ability to put on a show that appeals not just to your most invested partisans but the, shall I say, “casual consumer”, people who’ll tune in maybe once before returning to Thursday Night Football or “Dancing with the Stars”.  Obama lacked the former. Romney lacks neither.

Did you see the spot-on Saturday Night Live skit on “independent voters”?

As infuriating as Obama’s performance was in failing to toss up one-liners and smackdowns, what he actually said, in its meandering, dialed-back, “too polite” way was both fair and accurate. By now, it has been conclusively proven, and proven again, that virtually everything Romney said about everything of significance was, well, a lie.

The predicament, as many pundits have noted, is how do you call a lie a lie, or a liar a liar, without actually using either word?

The larger point is that in the debate arena, with, as I’ve said before, moderators who are not going to demand specific, coherent answers to their (highly generalized) questions, “performance prevarication” is an entirely effective strategy.  I’ve told my hand-wringing liberal friends over the past week that the 70 million people who watch the debate performance, in all it’s calculated artfulness, pales in comparison to the single digit millions who’ll react with astonishment at the fact-checkers’ evisceration of that performance the next morning.

Given the near instantaneous access to factual information — on tax plans, Tax Policy Center analyses, records of previous candidate statements on abortion, the Blunt amendment, Roe v. Wade, you name it, the cable channel I’d watch is the one that throws that stuff up in a real-time crawl. It’d be, you know, fair and informative.

Make no mistake, the burden is on Obama and, tonight, Joe Biden. The modern GOP is almost entirely an election machine. It’s contempt for government has been vividly reflected in its indifference to governing — for everything that is other than re-upholstering financial advantages for its peer and donor class. To beat that game you simply have to bring the fight … with a bit of humor substituting for angry indignation.

Also over the past week, I was gratified that a couple of the big dogs, Paul Krugman and Bill Clinton, followed my lead and hammered points I made after the first debate. (I’m going to bill those two.) Krugman in his assertion that the establishment media is incapable of dealing with a campaign like the Romney-Ryan circus, where … lying … is a conscious strategy, and Bubba in his description of the Romney debate performance as the minimally informed super-salesman “closer” who is wheeled in to charm the clients without getting mired in uncomfortable details. These kids meant it when they said they weren’t interested in a campaign dictated by fact-checkers.

It’s of course disheartening that today’s Tea Party/populist conservatives can be exhilarated into tumescence by shameless dishonesty. But most of them are blindered creatures of a routinely dishonest, sales-driven rhetorical culture. A commercial culture that places no serious value on credibility as you or I know it. Put another way, they don’t really expect their “team” to deliver anything they promise, other than of course those tax benefits I just mentioned. Campaigns are just “stuff you say”. A show you put on.

As for the sad trolls who float along behind the modern conservative machine piping their toy kazoos, they are unwitting chumps.  None the less they are delighted that their “team” is sticking it to the sort of people who avoided them in high school. The basic grievances of human nature never fully heal.

 

 

Pre-Gaming the First Debate

I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to 1) have the media invest tonight’s debate with any more importance for the Romney campaign than has been done over the last two weeks; 2) come up with another way to lower expectations for both candidates without reducing all of us to fits of giggles; 3) be any more primed for disappointment than all of us – left, right, center – are right now as we are almost certain to see a debate that is probably not going to deliver a knockout blow to Governor Romney, put President Obama on the defensive and the race back into a dead heat or – for the 11 remaining undecided voters in a swing state – illuminate much about what either client plans to do over the next four years.

It is, of course, possible that I’m wrong on any of these points, particularly #3, but statistics are on my side.  Why are nearly all of the most famous moments from Presidential debates from the 70s and 80s?  Because most of the time these events are not particularly memorable and don’t represent turning points in a campaign.

This reality is particularly true when the participants are Barack “No Drama” Obama and W. Mitt “the Robot” Romney.  While different in many ways, both men are generally very skilled at keeping their emotions in check and their talking points firmly in their forebrains.  Couple that with day…and days…and days…of debate camp and the throw down in Denver has all the suspense of two chessmasters replaying a game from the Fischer-Spassky era.  The image of an unscripted and freeflowing debate is just that; an image and not a reality.

None of this, of course, will prevent me from eagerly watching all 90 minutes and then listening to the post-debate analysis on as many channels as my wife will tolerate me surfing.  Here’s what I think we’ll be hearing after the debate:

1st and 20 – Romney Drops Back, Goes Deep…

The classic “Hail Mary” pass is a desperation play in the last seconds of the game when the only chance of victory is to wind up and heave the ball into the endzone with the hope that one of your receivers will miraculously come down with the ball and the win.

That said, there are lots of Hail Marys that are thrown much earlier in the game, usually when one team starts to feel the pressure of the clock, is down by a touchdown or so and concludes its game plan isn’t working.

Make no mistake, the Romney campaign has just thrown the first Hail Mary of the 2012 presidential election.  The ball is still in the air, but I’m not seeing a lot of receivers in the endzone.

I’m referring, of course, to Governor Romney’s doubling down on his now-infamous “fuggedaboutit” to the 47 percent of the country who apparently are only voting for Obama out of a lazy, selfish unwillingness to stop feeding off the work of the decent people.  Rather than try to deny the comments (which would have been well-nigh impossible IMHO) or try to mealy-mouth them away, the campaign and the candidate has embraced them and is trying to make them a fulcrum for a debate about a vision for America.  In the revised version of reality, Governor Romney would have us believe he wasn’t pandering to a crowd of rich folks that some people are worth keeping and some aren’t, but was instead “inelegantly” trying to frame a debate about the future of America.  As noted in the New York Times article on this long bomb, one that actually breaks with some very long-held conservative views:

Mr. Romney stood by his statement in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Tuesday. “I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America,” he said, adding that he hoped to improve the economy enough that people would be able to get well-paying jobs and rejoin the tax rolls.

So far, I’m not seeing much evidence that the play will work.  Despite a little razzle-dazzle in the form of the release of a 14-year old audio tape in which State Senator Obama goes on the record in support of – horrors! – “redistribution” in pursuit of the apparently un-American goal of “to make sure that everybody’s got a shot” (the comments were made in the context of how do we help the working poor) that has been slavishly flogged by the campaign’s principals and surrogates, the spin doesn’t seem to be working, even among the faithful (here and here and here and here and here just to name a few).

It’s be a few more seconds before the ball lands (uncaught I think).  That’ll make it 2nd and long with the clock at 48 days…and counting.  What’s the next play, Coach?

– Austin

Finally, the Real Mittens, Deep in His Comfort Zone.

It took a “candid” video in a room full of private equity dealers to meet the real Mittens Romney. But now we see him in his element, talking the talk. What struck me first about Romney’s instantly notorious “47% victims” spiel was how confident he sounded. Gone was the nervous, halting humanoid caricature who always sounds like he wants to field research “hello” and “my name is Mitt” with the party base before uttering another sentence.

By contrast, in the Boca Raton speech, Romney’s words move with a fluid cadence. Here is the guy who built Bain Capital and at innumerable points had to build a super salesman’s relationship with skeptical sellers and bankers. (Am I the only one who has wondered how a bumbler like the public Mittens ever pulled that off?) That guy finally appears on the Boca Raton video.

I’m just back from a 10-day trip to Lake Powell, where thankfully the only media was NOAA weather radio and my iPod. So I wondered, from time to time, how many Romney gaffes were going down while I was off the grid? Romney’s fire-aim-ready response to the Libyan consulate attack was pretty good, in terms of knee jerk pandering to … well, I’m not sure, “persuadables” who want us to send troops or more money into the Arab world, and/or nuke Iran?

But this 47% business — in Lake Powell terms — is a deep slot into which I never thought Romney would take us. And of course it turns out he didn’t take us, willingly.

Moreover this 47% victim thing isn’t a “gaffe”, in that it isn’t exactly what he meant to say. Having spent some time recently interviewing corporate leaders for magazine articles, I can assure you that the “47%” business is a frequently-traded meme. What is odd is that the reality of who pays taxes and who gets “government benefits” … instead of “accepting responsibility for their own lives” (gotta love that) is easily understood by any good high school level student. Hell, even David Brooks walks his readers through a few of the most obvious inconvenient nuances of “government benefits” in today’s column. (The key element, for all the moocher grannies and grandpas in Florida, is the taxpayer cost of medical services to the elderly, lay-abouts who as we all know never did a damned thing to help themselves or instill any bootstrap values in their offspring.)

The willingness to (appear to) believe cocked-up bullshit like the “victimhood” of 47% of the population is one of my favorite psychological curiosities. To the truly informed, its junk logic, of use only as a tactical tool. I suspect most of Mitten’s private equity audience are pretty bright people, skilled at reading prospective clients/chumps. Therefore, I doubt they play the 47% card indiscriminately. Most likely they parcel it out to those they find the most politically credulous … much as Team Mittens/Ryan does, in more coded language, to the GOP’s angry, desperate-to-believe-what-they-need-to-believe base. (The essential message is of course: “Your moocher neighbor is the problem in this country, not us private equity traders.”)

It is also worth noting in this episode how once again the mainstream media was nowhere on the story and had to follow the “fringe” into the heart of the matter. But when dissecting public comments of the jockeys and trainers is the essence of your game, you will on occasion miss the extra lead in the favorite’s saddle.

One other thought. As much as the focus will continue to be on the farcical ineptitude of Romney and his campaign, it is important to remember that … this is the best the GOP has to offer. The party today is a creature gorging on unlimited and largely undisclosed fat cat/private equity money and a rube-like base, with the former’s resources keeping the latter angry and misinformed. It is a complete captive of that dynamic.

As I’ve said often, out of the hilarious, beyond-satire cast of Republican characters this season, most of them self-aggrandizing huckster charlatans, Romney was the only one who could go behind closed doors with the monied heart of the beast and speak peer-to-peer, calmly, cooly and without fear of adverse disclosure.

Oops.

“Class Warfare”

Mondays are becoming bad days for Governor Romney.

Last Monday, you may remember, we woke to the debate over his criticism of Obama administration for its appeasing ways in the face of attacks on two of our diplomatic facilities.  Except, of course, it turned out Governor Romney was criticizing a statement that was issued by a staffer in Cairo before the attacks actually occurred.

Oops.

Whether you think this incident was an appalling lapse in judgement that confirmed your belief that Mitt is not ready to be promoted up from his office supply chain (my view) or whether you think this was yet another case of the liberal media and Obama sycophants trying to make something out of nothing (see the comments section of the “Mitt’s Character Moment”), the result of Mr. Romney’s statement was a whole week’s worth of debate over the appropriateness of his statement that culminated in every weekend talk show having a “Is Romney losing?” discussion and a long, long, long article on Politico detailing the growing disfunction within the Romney campaign .  At best, a waste of precious days for the Governor and there’s some polling evidence that he’s done some real damage to himself.

Which brings us to this Monday when Mother Jones magazine posted a video of candidate Romney declaring class warfare on half of the country:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…Our message of low taxes doesn’t connect…so my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Conservatives are fond of crying “class warfare” when anyone dares suggest raising taxes or that there might be something less that perfect equality of opportunity in America.  “They’re trying to divide us, set us against one another.  It’s un-American!” they like to claim.

The way I hear this, Governor Romney just declared war on me, my family and most of my friends who pay taxes, who believe in doing for themselves but who also believe that government is not the enemy of its people and that it helps to steady the hand of capitalism.  In Mr. Romney’s worldview, being in favor of “radical” ideas like universal health care or a social safety net or providing food or subsidized housing for people who live in poverty also apparently means we’re shiftless, lazy parasites living off the sweat of all the “good” people (presumably the ones who paid a reported $50,000 a piece for the privilege of hearing this hate speech live and in person) and that he doesn’t see it as his job to worry about us – either during the election or should he be elected.

Well, we don’t have to worry about Governor Romney either.  Screw you, Governor, and the Bentley you rode in on.  I’m pretty sure you can take the next 7 weeks off because I’m not seeing how you’re digging yourself out of this one.

– Austin

Mitt’s Character Moment

Michelle Obama said last week, “I have seen first-hand that being president doesn’t change who you are — it reveals who you are.”

So too does running for president and today was a revealing moment for those of us wondering about the character of Mitt Romney in his statements regarding the deaths of our ambassador and three others in Libya.  What I see is not very appealing: a man who 1) leaps before thinking 2) is willing to perpetuate an untruth for political advantage 3) will do most anything if he thinks it will get him a step closer to the presidency.

One of the pundits on TV noted that it was about this time four years ago when Lehman Brothers melted down and shortly thereafter John McCain “suspended” his campaign in order to deal with the economy.  In hindsight, this was seen as the moment when Senator McCain’s campaign went irrevocably off the rails.  I wonder if we’ll mark this moment as when Governor Romney’s campaign went the same way.

I wasn’t voting for him anyway, but this makes me more sure than ever that Governor Romney peaked when he did his groundbreaking work in making the world safe for another office supply company.

– Austin

Welcome to the First Completely Post-Factual, All Bull[****] Campaign.

I’m feeling better. In my last post I suggested it was a kind of post-hippie, gauzy-eyed, chemical flashback optimism that led me to think America’s generally flaccid “mainstream” press corp was stumbling toward holding politicians accountable to the truth this season. Now I think I can grasp something tangible. In the course of a week two remarkable events have leapt out into the media’s face.

First, Paul Ryan’s speech to the GOP convention. And then … Mr. Ryan’s highly revealing claim that he once ran a two-hour fifty minute marathon.

Over the past seven days people like James Fallows at The Atlantic have noted the — unusual — lengths The Los Angeles Times and other publications have gone to dissecting Ryan (and others’) convention speeches for their shameless parade of fractional truths, complete non-truths and stuff they just clearly pulled out of their white asses. Simultaneously, the topic of what reporters (and their revenue-anxious bosses) should do in the face of “campaigns” demonstrating such a complete indifference to facts and accuracy has dominated conversations on earnest, wonky, “reality-based” public radio shows like “On the Media”. While the latter is speaking to a niche audience with — just guessing here — a single-digit affinity for the Romney-Ryan ticket and the entire modern GOP ethos, if I dare call it that. When big, second-tier papers like the LA Times (albeit in securely Democratic California) start making an issue of flagrant lying, you can safely say the worm is turning.

As I said last week, part of the problem is that the GOP campaign to date has been such a colossal farce. First it was the Sarah Palin-Herman Cain-Michele Bachmann-Donald Trump vaudeville act. Now we have Mitt Romney, a man who has been so steadfast in his refusal to explain exactly how he’d create 12 million jobs, get tough with Vladimir Putin and lay out to fellow Americans precisely how he bootstrapped his way to fantastic financial success that the ordinary press has little option other than to treat a strategy of opacity and rhetorical fraud as a bona fide issue. The press suspects, as I believe the general public also does, that Romney’s career is built on a bedrock of semi-piracy, (gorging on the casino spin of debt, which as Bain handled it required sliding gutted pension programs off on taxpayers) and the ruthless gaming of a tax system that his company and peers lobbied into existence.

But this marathon business — an otherwise silly exaggeration — accelerates and ingrains the notion that Romney and Ryan can be/must be handled differently than even a manifest air head charlatan like Sarah Palin.

Where the roots and mechanisms of Romney’s fortune remain obscured by the arcane terminology of exotic finance — and Romney’s refusal to disclose anything more to “you people”, as Mrs. Romney refers to the press adds to the curtain — flagrant lying like Ryan on his marathon prowess is a much easier — much easier — window for the average voter into “the real person within”.  (BTW, that “you people” line/attitude is not a good strategy for keeping the impudent media dogs off your lawn.)

Big, highly public events like political campaigns are always vulnerable to seemingly extraneous, petty events that distort the careful focus, like someone suddenly slapping on a fish-eye lens. So it may well be with Ryan’s marathon gaffe and how it cements a now well-established reputation for self-aggrandizing mendacity. Post-marathon bullshit, his crediblity is seen through fundamentally different glass.

The “average voter” probably had the same reaction I did to hearing about Ryan’s whopper — told on a right-wing radio show, not over drinks with his P90X buddies. When a guy exaggerates his prowess at anything, by a little, no one much notices or cares. For me to say for example that I once shot par at the Edina Country Club might astonish anyone who has seen me play golf, but the average audience probably won’t think a moment longer, assuming even the worst duffer can have one out-of-his-mind experience. But … if I go around saying I shot a seven-under par, anyone who has ever played the game has a whiplash moment. Life teaches discerning adults that someone who feels a need to lie/prevaricate so flagrantly is someone with a psychology that knows it is a house of lies and is essentially pleading to be caught and revealed.

Several writers and sites have noted the popular response to Al Gore for “saying he invented the internet”, something he never said but suffered with far more patience than I could have ever mustered. Gore’s actual statement has been heavily fact-checked, and he has a long career built on treating scientific facts as sacred, “inconvenient” things.

Not so much in Ryan’s case. What he said in a half-dozen different points in his big, nationally televised speech and about his marathon ability has now been heavily fact-checked … and proven wholly, utterly false or at best, grossly misleading.

Team Romney may believe they can get away with running the first wall-to-wall completely post-factual All Bullshit campaign, unabashedly ignoring demands for details and transparency and shamelessly repeating the most transparent lies.

But I’m saying they have taunted and tempted an inconvenient fate.

And Now for Something Completely Different…

Well, that was different.

I’m not much of a Rachel Maddow sycophant, but I have to agree with her that Clint Eastwood’s 11-minute performance at last night’s RNC was the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in a major party convention.  Maddow was left speechless – for once – and so was I by the surreal sight of Mr. Eastwood rambling and ad-libbing to an empty chair.  Between the mumbling and the fly-away hairdo, Mr. Eastwood came off less like Dirty Harry and more like the old guy down the block who was pretty normal and neighborly in a curmudgeonly way until the day he started cutting the lawn in his underwear with a katana strapped to his back.

His performance makes two things abundantly clear:

1) Nobody – I mean NOBODY – vetted Eastwood’s remarks.  Not even so much as a “Mr. Eastwood, what do you need with the chair?”

2) Actors without good writers to give them good material are rarely worth listening to.

You are, of course, welcome to disagree with me on this point, but I am 100% sure that Team Romney counts this as a hot mess that is stepping all over the next-day coverage of what was supposed to be “All About Mitt.” Instead, The Big Speech (which in the words of Fox’s Chris Wallace was “workmanlike” at best) has to contend with headlines like:

• “After a Gunslinger Cuts Loose, Romney Aides Take Cover” – New York Times
• “Ann Romney: Eastwood Did “A Unique Thing” – CBS News
• “Clint Eastwood Riff Distracts From Successful Romney Convention” – Washington Post
• “Clint Eastwood Speech Backfires on Republicans” – Boston.com
• “Clint Eastwood at the GOP convention: effective, or strange?” – Christian Science Monitor
• “Clint Eastwood’s empty chair at RNC sparks Internet buzz” – NBC News
• “Clint Eastwood puts liberals in full panic mode” – New York Daily News
• “Eastwood mocked for kooky speech at GOP convention” – San Jose Mercury News
• “Clint Eastwood speech with empty chair upstages Mitt Romney at GOP convention” – Newsday
• “Eastwood, the empty chair and the speech everyone is talking about” – CNN

And on and on and on.  As of now, Google News is serving up more than 1,500 stories related to the Eastwood speech.  Every one of them distracts, detracts from or otherwise obscures the message Romney and company were hoping we’d be talking about today but aren’t.

Check out the New York Times‘ story this morning on who was responsible for this clusterfuck:

Clint Eastwood’s rambling and off-color endorsement of Mitt Romney on Thursday seemed to startle and unsettle even the candidate’s own top aides, several of whom made a point of distancing themselves from the decision to put him onstage without a polished script.

“Not me,” said an exasperated-looking senior adviser, when asked who was responsible for Mr. Eastwood’s speech. In late-night interviews, aides variously called the speech “strange” and “weird.” One described it as “theater of the absurd.”

Finger-pointing quickly ensued, suggesting real displeasure and even confusion over the handling of Mr. Eastwood’s performance, which was kept secret until the last minute.

A senior Republican involved in convention planning said that Mr. Eastwood’s appearance was cleared by at least two of Mr. Romney’s top advisers, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens. This person said that there had been no rehearsal, to the surprise of the rest of the campaign team.

But another adviser said that several top aides had reviewed talking points given to Mr. Eastwood, which the campaign had discussed with the actor as recently as a few hours before his appearance. Mr. Eastwood, however, delivered those points in a theatrical, and at times crass, way that caught Romney aides off guard, this person said.

Mr. Stevens, in an interview, said he would not discuss internal decision making but described Mr. Eastwood’s remarks as improvised.

There’s some profiles in courage there. I can hardly wait for a Romney presidency in which the aides race one another to their iPhones to rat out their colleagues – anonymously of course – when real decisions go wrong.

Couple last  night’s mess with everything else that went wrong or off-message in Tampa (cancellation of Day 1, the Christie keynote (aka “It’s All About Me”), the cult of Paul Ryan, the peanut tossers, being upstaged by his wife and Condeleeza Rice, the untruths of the Ryan speech, the Ron Paul distractions) and this was NOT a good convention for Romney. Anne Romney, maybe, but not Mitt.

Yes, the GOP talking points would have us believe otherwise, but the reality is that Mitt Romney got less out of this convention than almost anyone. Instead of a bounce, I’m expecting more of a post-convention “thud” in the next set of polls.

Oh well, there’s still the debates.  Governor Romney was pretty good in the Republican debates where he could play Snow White to the Seven Dwarfs but I’m not entirely sure he’ll come across so well in a one-on-one comparison with Obama.

– Austin

 

Death By PowerPoint Point Two

Scene: Port Richey, Florida, Post Office.

Date: Saturday, August 11, 2012.

Dramatis Personae: My wife Lisa, two elderly women, Paul Ryan lingering on the airwaves.

Action: First elderly woman, who had just heard about Ryan being picked, reaches the counter with the help of her friend. “Where are your voter registration forms? I need to make sure they have my right address. I have to vote against Ryan. He’s going to take away Medicare.”

Curtain.

Observation: The Obama campaign, despite the progress they’ve made lately showing Romney to be what he is, still can’t get the message clear and ringing. Even the new ad after the Ryan pick talks about “top down” economics. Wow, that’ll rally the troops. “No top down!” But the Republicans, with Ryan, have finally clarified the message for the Democrats. “They want to take away some of your Medicare and give the money that saves to rich people.”

Roosting Chickens: The Reagan Revolution is indeed trickling down. Part of the Reagan philosophy is to get spending, and the taxing that supports it, closer to the voters. Less Federal spending, more local decisions on spending. Ryan’s plan to cut Medicaid spending and turn it into block grants to the states puts spending decisions closer to home. Where taking care of poorer people’s medical needs (which if not taken care of results in either more and more public spending as poorer people become sicker poorer people, or in dead people in the streets) will compete with all the other things states spend on. And all states are short of money now, which means the local governments they help support are short of money. So, in effect, the Reagan Revolution, in which Ryan carries a big torch, is showing up more and more in states and local governments having less to spend on schools and roads and libraries and law enforcement. Everyone who isn’t a millionaire who says “no new taxes” better realize that means less of everything. You ride a bus, you drive on a road or over a bridge, you use the library for internet access, you hope the fire department will come — less, slower, worse. And how’s the One Percent doing in all this? Better, much better under Reagan-Ryan-Romney.

All We Need to Know About Ryan: From today’s New York Times, talking about Romney and Ryan — “The two men share an easy rapport and a love of PowerPoint presentations and policy details.” OMG.

— Bruce Benidt
(Image from gossip.mentalbreeze.com)

A “Brave Choice”

Don Adams, president of the Independence Hall Tea Party PAC, correctly described Governor Romney’s choice of Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan as a “brave choice.”  He’s 100% right.  Bravery is showing courage and daring in the face of danger and there is no doubt in my mind that Governor Romney would not have acted so bravely but for the belief that without it his candidacy was in great danger.  You could argue that John McCain acted bravely, too, when he picked Sarah Palin.  Foolishly, but, bravely.

To save Newt and Eric the sputtering comments, no, I don’t equate Paul Ryan with Sarah Palin (though he’s no Lyndon Johnson or even a George H.W. Bush), but he also is a risk.  Young, very conservative and a bit of a one-trick pony with a savant’s grasp of the budget issues, but not much else that I can think of, Paul Ryan is on the ticket only because Governor Romney, who never took a risk he could avoid, is sweating the numbers, and more importantly, the trend he sees in the polls.

We’ll see how it plays out.  As Willy Wonka says, “The suspense is terrible; I hope it lasts.”

– Austin

Harry Reid Plays The Lying Game

Like most, I doubt that Harry Reid actually has the goods on Mitt Romney’s taxes. He of course says a source at Romney’s Bain Capital told him Mittens didn’t pay a dime’s worth of taxes for a decade. While a multi-multi-millionaire like Romney avoiding all federal taxation is far from improbable — just look at General Electric — the issue is whether Reid actually knows this, or whether, as most think, he’s bluffing to force Romney to release the tax forms and prove him wrong.

Now, old Harry many not be many things, among them a silky slick media operator. The guy is more dogged than artful. But he must have decided he’ll risk the hit if Romney ever does release his tax information — for a decade, not just an estimate for the past quarter — and proves that, yes, by god, he did pay as much in total taxes as a Target check-out clerk. So take that Harry, you slimy liar!

But of course the controversy over Reid’s claim — which he has shamelessly repeated — is that it is proof of the rancid gutter politics regularly practiced by liberals (Harry Reid raging liberal … ) against righteous defenders of America’s moral core, which is to say entrepreneurial, job-creating patriots like Romney and Karl Rove and … well, you know the suspect line-up as well as I do. Even Jon Stewart ripped Reid, as has every conservative blogger who hasn’t had their electricity turned off for non-payment.

Stewart and other non-echo chamber ideologues were disappointed that so prominent a figure in the dwindling adult caucus of Congress had descended to the same level of well, lying your ass off for headlines and cash, as the … entire GOP presidential field and all their SuperPAC managers. “Liberals”, Stewart implied, are supposed to be playing a more noble game.

This dichotomy of standards is of course germane to us here at The Same Rowdy Crowd as we furiously make notes for Wednesday’s inaugural book club. (Scroll down for details). It will be a (polite and collegial) discussion of “It’s Even Worse Than It looks”, Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann’s unequivocating indictment of the reckless insurgent games today’s conservative movement regularly plays with the truth and the function of government. (Warning: Please arrive on time and with your cell phones off. The Great and Wonderful Austin will deduct full points for tardiness and texting during his lecture.)

The problem that Reid’s ploy creates for anyone who still has some respect for truth, is that it offers ideal cover for journalists — who, in tough economic times, have an aversion to over-playing “the truth thing”. With Reid most likely lying/bullshitting for tactical effect, journalists can exhale and repeat with great confidence that, “You see, both sides are doing it.”

A quick personal story. A few weeks ago an otherwise fine local TV station asked me to come out and regale their audience with my deep thoughts on a matter of grave importance. I forget now what the hook was, but the questioning went immediately to the poisonous atmosphere in politics today with both sides saying so many silly and terrible things about each other. Having been through the punditry thing a time or two I understood that my role was to play some kind of Solomonic Master of Balance, commiserating with the anchor about the squalid state of affairs, decrying the overall debasement of civil discourse and wringing hands over the unlikelihood of anything changing … at least until the asteroid strikes.

But I wasn’t into it that day, and I had just finished reading a chunk of Ornstein and Mann’s book. So, instead of the ritual commiseration, I suggested to the anchor that if journalists’ concern about the corrosive effect of so much lying on American life was as sincere as they made it seem, they held in their hands a fairly simple mitigator … which would be … the truth. Point being, instead of “reporting” the latest asinine tactical attack by one side or the other as though that was the beginning and end of the story, take on as a responsibility, and a journalistic standard, ascertaining what was true and reporting both the facts of any claim AND the name of the person or group filling the airwaves with flagrant falsehoods. I also added, for effect, that while it is true both sides engage in eye-rolling “untruth”, the fact is the modern Republican party engages in it far … far …more often and egregiously than liberals, and until an editorial decision is made to ID the worst perpetrators and make them own their deceits, nothing much is going to change.

The anchor’s response to this was to warn against a descent into “opinion journalism”. Mine to that was that it was the anti-thesis of “opinion” if it was factually accurate.

When the five-minute interview ended I told the young producer, “I’ll be interested to see how much of that makes the final cut”, and of course very little did. Post-editing, I was reduced to another concerned, commiserating hand-wringer lamenting the debased nature of America’s public dialogue. That being the narrative that fits most comfortably with commercial news.

The Vice-Presidential Puzzle Box

Rumor has it that Governor Romney has settled on – and will soon announce – his vice presidential candidate.  The conventional wisdom is that the list is down to Ohio Senator Rob Portman, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and – maybe – Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio and former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice were floated either as trial balloons or to demonstrate the alleged breadth of their selection process before they pick the white guy (no, Jindal is not a “white guy” but read below why he won’t be picked according to the logic of vice presidential picking).

What a yawn fest.  Any group in which Tim Pawlenty is judged to be the most dynamic and energetic member has a serious personality deficit.

In truth, though, vice presidential nominees tend to be on the uninspiring side of the ledger and are usually picked for one or more of the following reasons:

• Safe (i.e. no skeletons, no surprises)
• Bland (doesn’t overshadown the top of the ticket)
• Balance (geography, experience, political spectrum, age, religion)
• Key attribute (ethnicity, swing state residency)

Let’s review the list of some of the most recent vice-presidential nominees and see where they fit:

• 2008:   Biden – balance (age, experience), safe; Palin – (see below)
• 2004:   Edwards – key attribute (swing state), balance (geography, religion)
• 2000:   Lieberman – balance (political spectrum); Cheney – balance (experience, geography, age), safe
• 1996:    Kemp – balance (political spectrum, geography), safe
• 1992:    Gore – safe, bland, balance (experience)
• 1988:    Quayle – bland, balance (age, political spectrum); Bentsen – balance (experience, political spectrum, geography), safe
• 1984:    Ferraro – (see below)
• 1980:    Bush – balance (age, political spectrum, experience, geography)

Thirty-two years of electoral politics is enough to make the point, but the pattern is discernible in every election.  The most common reason for picking a vice president is “balance” in terms of geography, experience, etc. Only rarely does picking a vice presidential candidate deliver that person’s home state – Lyndon Johnson being the only example that comes to mind.  Other attributes come into play when there are particular flaws at the top of the ticket.  George W. Bush, for example, had to pick a Cheney-esque figure to counter the perception that he was too much of a lightweight to be president.  By contrast, George H.W. Bush picked Quayle in part because he was so lightweight that there was no possibility that he would overshadow his boss.

Which brings us to the last reason why vice-presidential candidates are chosen: as “game changers.”   There are only two people in this category in the last eight presidential elections – Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sara Palin in 2008.  Both were picked by campaigns desperate enough to throw Hail Mary passes in the hope of an end zone miracle.  Both failed: Ferraro’s selection couldn’t possibly hold back the landslide that re-elected Reagan in ’84 and Palin made the ’08 loss a little worse (though a “safe” pick from one of the traditional categories wouldn’t have made a difference).

Mitt Romney is NOT John McCain and even without the immediate example of Sara Palin as a warning there is no chance of him picking a game changer.  First, he has an actuary’s dislike of risk and has never as far as I can tell taken a high-risk step in either his personal or professional life.  Second, he’s in no way desperate; the election is still a jump ball and he has $1 billion or more on his side to help him jump higher than the other guys.

So…applying the logic of vice-presidential candidates to the current crop, Jindal is out.  Portman is tempting, but I think in the end our own Tim Pawlenty will be the guy bounding onto a stage somewhere in a swing state sometime soon to tell us how proud he is to have been asked to join Mitt Romney in reclaiming America.

Wa-hoo!

– Austin

It was a Mitts-krieg!

Mittens is in a long-term bind of his own long-term making. I have been saying — for a long time now — that Mitt Romney is the absolutely ideal candidate to run against in the prop wash of a worldwide recession driven by … the self-serving casino-like gaming of guys exactly like Mitt Romney.  Romney and Bain Capital’s form and style of business may befuddle the mythical Average American, but Joe and Sally Venti Latte know a few things for sure, among them that they could never benefit from the byzantine tax dodges, shelters and debt-leveraging strategies Romney used, and that Bain in some cases lobbied into law.

As a media hand I was greatly amused by last Friday’s end-of-the-week “Mitts-krieg”, wherein the notorious bubble candidate, Romney, appeared in a quick succession of satellite interviews with five networks, (although not with those impudent knaves at MSNBC). Everyone in the news game is familiar with the Friday afternoon data/news dump, wherein something that is going to cause problems or play badly is thrown out at the very moment most reporters are heading to Happy Hour. The strategy being that by Monday, chances are, whatever had to be said will be flattened by a new story and quickly forgotten.

Good luck on that with your financial history, Mittens.

Even more amusing, for anyone who knows the TV news game is the choice of the satellite format, with each network dropping in for a tightly allotted slice of time, rather than a press conference — with reporters from the same networks who are most likely within walking distance of wherever Romney is in a given moment.

The satellite-interview shtick pretty much guaranteed that each network would ask exactly the same question — every candidate can rely on journalistic group-think to ease the dike patching in an emergency. With each asking that same question, Romney could, and did provide each with exactly the same answer. He could stay on script, bloviating away most of the allotted time.  In an open press conference he would have risked some scurrilous bastard, perhaps a pot-smoking Lutheran or atheist hedonist from something like Mother Jones who snuck in under the velvet ropes, to blurt out a follow-up or pursue a more specific facet on the standard line of questioning.

While Average Americans like you and me try to define exactly what “retired retroactively” means, we can be assured that Romney’s troubles explaining both how and when he made his fortune are not going to go away, probably ever.

Team Obama had to have kept a supply of fresh napkins close by to deal with all the drool conjured up by the thought of running against Mitt Romney. I mean, think about it. After a job-crushing, debt-inflating financial sector meltdown caused by the casino culture of a highly insulated financial class that put “shareholder value” and their own lavish bonuses before actually making stuff — that required middle-class workers — the GOP couldn’t stop itself from nominating a … financial “services” guy. A guy whose business was creating fantastic profits for himself and his closest associates, often with the collateral damage of shutting down functioning American industries … in the interests of productivity and efficiency, you understand.

(And the GOP couldn’t help itself because despite the noisy babble of the Tea Party lunkheads, it is big money, dependent on “worker productivity” — more work, less pay — and the shift of taxation from them to the middle class that sustains  the party.)

Running against sex-obsessed Rick Santorum wouldn’t have been half as much fun.

Team Obama’s real problem will be pacing themselves through the rest of campaign, doling out the right quality of “attack” (i.e revelation of Mittens’ career work) at precisely the right moment, each one fresher than the last yet oddly familiar

The business of Romney’s taxes alone will be gold for weeks to come, at least. Again, ask yourself why he hasn’t simply released them, “taken the hit”, as George Will suggests, and moved on? We all know he’s rich. We already know that he’s only paying a 13%-15% tax rate — thanks to the lobbying of Bain Capital to drive those rates that low — and that he/Bain has over 100 off-shore accounts in the Grand Cayman alone. How much worse could it be?

I’m guessing,”quite a bit”. And in ways that Team Romney can’t calculate, given the microscopic analysis those returns will go under once out in the open. If ten years worth of returns (and his 2010 return alone was 500 pages) produces only 10 uncomfortable questions for Romney, a guy who embodies sweaty discomfort in the face of impudent questioning, that’s almost one a week until election day.

Sweeet.

But until then Mittens has other critical decisions. Like, for example, how to get Sarah Palin up in front of his convention, with him, in a photo-op that satisfies the Teabaggers, without torching himself with the persuadables, folks who may not be happy with Obama’s inability to work an economic miracle, but think the modern Republican party is a ship of toxic fools.

 

 

 

 

 

With Immigration, Mittens Actually Has to Do Something.

The fascination of the day is what the Republicans and Mitt Romney are going to do — actually DO, not just bloviate over and obfuscate — about immigration. The laissez-faire, Libertarian,what’s good for Bain Capital is good for America crowd are on the horns of a dilemma with this one.

Since President Obama went unilateral (at long last) with his decision to stop prosecuting children of “illegal” immigrants, Romney and his advisors have been flapping around like an invasive carp tossed up on the banks of the Rio Grande. To agree with Obama is … well, that’s not even conceivable. The GOP position since November ’08 is to never agree with Obama on anything and blame him for everything, including, as is always worth reminding, the multi-trillion debt run-up of the George W./Dick Cheney administration. Not to mention their inability to push sensible immigration reform past their troglodyte partisans, many of whom are eager to believe that wave after wave of brown-skinned types are pouring across our borders beheading patriotic ranchers and god knows, fornicating with livestock, instead of, you know, picking strawberries in the Central Valley.

The problem is exacerbated because immigration is an issue that actually requires discernible action. You really do have to do something. Immigration is an issue that delivers a lot of immediate, empirical feedback to the effected. This is in contrast to the central — and easily/constantly obfuscatable — tenet of modern conservatism which is that packing on more (and more) tax relief for “job creators” is the only way to restart the economy. With that one conservative partisans can argue ad nauseam that the current level of tax relief is never enough, that liberals are continuing to practice “class warfare” against the only productive members of society, that Barney Frank and Fannie Mae caused the Wall St. meltdown and that “out of control” government spending, requiring laying off thousands of middle class government workers is the only possible way to achieve fiscal balance and employment growth.

They can say all that because the average low information voter finds finance bewildering and is generally inclined to believe that all government — on every level — is inhabited by a bunch of hopeless screw ups.

But … immigration … either the government does something to rectify the problem, or it doesn’t. By stopping the prosecution of young people here because of their parents and opening a path toward citizenship, Obama is doing … something. Still not a lot, but something to alleviate a long, long-festering problem that wouldn’t have festered nearly so long if the modern GOP had any serious intention of, you know, running the government like business. In business you identify problems and solve them. In politics, which is, let’s be honest, is all the Republicans are ever doing these days, you play inane rhetorical games and create as much chaos as possible in hopes of gaining back full power … at which point you can double down your tax cut dreams for the “job creators”.

Another irony with the immigration issue is that the presence of so many “illegals”, (and I use quote marks to suggest that there is a qualitative difference between illegal immigration to do work no American wants to do, and homicidal rampaging), has been shown to be a modest net gain for the economy. This is due to significant gains for the “illegal” fruit pickers and leaf blowers AND the corporate farmers, ranchers, slaughterhouse operations that employ them. (Not so much for school districts and hospitals.)

Presumably a good chunk of those large-scale farm and livestock interests are sympathetic to other Republican policies — like more tax cuts. But as it is, even they aren’t getting relief from the GOP. Large scale employers remain as vulnerable to INS raids as ever, although they are hardly the key villain in the minds of Tea Party conservatives as the Guatemalan who shows up in Pueblo, Colorado with a pair of sandals and a sleeping bag.

In general, Mitt Romney has nothing constructive to offer on any issue you can mention. (The thought of someone as gelatinous as Romney making foreign policy decisions is truly frightening.) But where he can fake it by bewildering the cynical public about finance, job creation with economic double-speak, when it comes to immigration he has to come up with something that actually … does something.

Unless its tax relief for private equity wealth creators, “doing something” ain’t Mitt’s game.

Don Draper for President

By coincidence I’ve been catching up on the past three seasons of “Mad Men” while working on a magazine story that involves interviewing a handful of the area’s bona fide .1%-ers. In the context of whether there is enough money and media machinery to sell the country a caricature of plutocratic cluelessness as dense as Mitt Romney, it’s been an interesting confluence of fiction and fact.

I’ve just finished Season 4, and all I know about the current year is that at some point Lane Pryce decks baby-faced Peter Campbell in an ill-considered office duel, sending the poor guy into an existential spiral. Personally I’m more interested in how bombshell Joanie thinks she’s going to foist off Roger Sterling’s bastard child — conceived in the apres throes of a mugging — as her husband’s. But as I left it Don has taken up with another child bride, the elegant Megan of the swan neck, and the world of hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, secretary-schtupping clod maleness was teetering on a brink.

While I regard “Mad Men” as a much less relevant and compelling show than “Breaking Bad”, a bona fide TV classic for its rampage through several layers of 21st century American zeitgeist, the saga of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is terrific story-telling about a supposedly long-ago lost age when “The Business of America Is (Was) Business”.

Except of course very little of that has changed. We are still all about selling stuff.

Women and minorities are treated better in the business culture of 2012. Cigarettes aren’t advertised on TV. And even a guy as dapper and charming as Don Draper would be eviscerated in cyberspace for even one of his office transgressions, not to mention what HR would have a legal obligation to do to him, private company or not. So there’s been some improvement.

But the reason I continue to tell people that Mitt Romney is the conversation this country should have right now is because he represents — in his wholesome Mormon way — the clear and logical extension of Don Draper and the ’60s Mad Men. Like them, the ends — more sales, fatter profit margins — is an end that justifies the means. And like a slippery ad man blithely contorting truth and logic, Romney has proven himself willing and able to say anything — and I mean anything — to move his product, which of course is Mitt Romney and (implicitly) the protection of the enfranchised elite.

All the CEOs I’ve been chatting with — bankers and retailers — have up-from-middle-class pedigrees. None of the bunch was to the manor born. Although, a couple had business-savvy fathers and most had a talent for math. Politics per se hasn’t been on the agenda, but re-floating the economy has, and the consensus is that more regulation and “uncertainty” is perilous for a full recovery.

Romney was an inevitability given the spectacularly inept competition the modern conservative movement put up against him. And while I seriously doubt it, it is possible he could win. His positions on financial reform/regulation and other significant government-regulated money issues have sympathetic ears in executive suites because … they hew to a familiar, established model that large businesses used (not illegally, necessarily) to prosper. Dramatic change is an expense every EBITDA-anxious executive prefers to avoid, and truth be told, once you rise to the .1%, nothing that any mere President does is going to effect you all that much.

Not so everyone else, of course. But unlike your average bank CEO, you and your neighbors can only pretend to understand economics on a titanic scale. Most people buy into the quaint but hopelessly out of touch correlation between “a family working their budget over the kitchen table” and providing guidance and transparency to the $15 trillion American economy.

In an ideal world, the presence of Mitt Romney in a presidential campaign would be an opportunity for a six month course in high finance, on the value (or lack of it) of leveraged buy-outs, exotic financial “instruments” and products”, mechanisms beyond the understanding of even Alan Greenspan, once a guru of high finance, now justifiably regarded as a feckless enabler of anonymous savants with a much higher aptitude for math than he or 99.99% of the rest of the planet.

It goes without saying that I doubt we’ll get anything like an adult conversation in the value of maintaining our highly/inordinately financialized economic model, where so much money is kited back and forth as gambling bets and not nearly enough is directed at capital expansion. One reason is that this sort of conversation is far too arcane and dull for the media that most people prefer to consume. I love the Seamus the Dog on the Roof stuff as much as anyone. But how the likes of Bain Capital used perfectly legal maneuvers to unload pension obligations on the government/taxpayers while exploiting (perfectly legal) tax advantages (that they lobbied in to place) to exempt themselves from liabilities you and I would have to pay on the profit from selling Mom and Dad’s house is a lot more relevant to my idea of a “robust recovery”, as the CEOs like to say, than a doofus mistreating his dog.

Still, the possibility is there and a serious conversation about how we do business in 2012 America is far more likely with Romney on the scene than, say Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. Either of those two at the top of the ticket (or any of the other “candidates” save Jon Huntsman) would have meant an entire lost year of eye-rolling stupidity, pandering to the dimmest and angriest and breathtaking cynicism.

Ok, you got me. Romney will deliver all of that. But with his bankroll his style of cynical pandering  will come with a Don Draper gloss where the others would continue to look and sound like an infomercial produced on the cheap by someone’s alcoholic uncle.

Finally, in the realm of show biz … I can’t tell you how many times a day I’m stopped on the streets and asked about my performance in “Patti Rocks”, the dramedy shot by my old buddy David Burton Morris back in the ’80s. (Actually I do know the number.) Though I was crushed when Morris cut my nude scene — the MPAA is such a bunch of prudes, each of those acts was dramatically valid —  I was pleased to learn the other day that David has a new movie in the works. Titled, “Full Cleveland”, it is set up with Ransom Pictures in LA for an early 2013 shoot.

And what, you ask is “Full Cleveland”? It is, he says, “a road movie romance between two totally mismatched characters”. David will be partnering with Guy Louthan his producer on “The Price of Love”. Louthan is finishing up a thriller with Halle Berry and little Abigail Breslin called “The Hive”.

And yes, I will be auditioning for a lead role. Although, frankly, I was younger then, and I don’t know if my skin can tolerate all the hair removal and bleaching again.

With Independent Voters, Crategate Bites

What do independent voters make of the odd story of Governor Mitt Romney scaring the crap out of his dog by strapping him in a crate to the top of his car at highway speeds? Clark Griswold benign? Cruel and unusual?

According to a Public Policy Polling survey conducted last week:

• By more than a 5-to-1 margin, independent/other voters thought Romney’s treatment of the family dog was “inhumane” (66% said “inhumane”, 12% said it was “humane”).

• By a 12-to-1 margin, independent/other voters said the incident makes them less likely to choose Romney (36% said “less likely”, 3% said “more likely”).

• 55% of independent/other voters had no opinion of Romney on the subject of dog treatment, indicating the story is familiar to about half of Americans at this stage of the campaign.

This issue is not as prominent as “Obamneycare” style flip-floppery. But with the swing voters who will decide the election, Crategate elicits more bite than lick.

– Loveland

Mitt’s Mutt Matters

Impactful issue?

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin advise us that about 46% of Americans self identify as dog people, 12% as cat people, and 28% as both dog and cat people. In all, an overwhelming three-fourths of Americans are down with the dogs.

I share this market segmentation because it may explain why first Newt Gingrich and today Rick Santorum are bringing up the bizarre tale of Mitt Romney reportedly strapping his crated Irish Setter Seamus onto the top of the family vehicle for a lengthy family trip at highway speeds. Reportedly, when Seamus relieved himself mid-trip, due to fear, stress or bursting bowel, Mitt hosed the mutt, and put him back on top.

Grrr, say the dog lovers. Ruff stuff.

Most political consultants will tell you that “Who would I rather have a beer with” really is a relevant political metric. So, is this also a relevant political metric: “Who would I rather have dog sit my little snookems?”

In all seriousness, this will end up costing Governor Romney votes. At best, it makes him look like an oddball, and makes you wonder what other weird ideas lie beneath the hair gelled facade. At worst, it makes him look completely heartless. For a guy struggling mightily to connect with ordinary families, 74% of whom are dog people, this story just can’t be helpful.

Many issue wonks dismiss these kinds of human interest-type controversies as irrelevant. But in an election where the issue positions of the GOP candidates are very similar, and, at this stage, very familiar, these water cooler topics will impact voter opinions on a gut level, both now and in the General Election.

In politics, spouse abuse has long been verboten. It is very difficult for wife beaters to get elected. In this groundbreaking 2012 election, we will soon see whether dog abuse has an impact.

– Loveland

“I’ve Got a Lot to Lose and I’m Betting High So I’m Begging You…”

“…Before it ends, just tell me where to begin.”

With apologies to Fiona Apple, at least three of the candidates in tonight’s GOP debate are probably humming the Criminal lyrics right now as they do their final debate prep.  What’s at stake tonight for Speaker Gingrich, Governor Romney and Senator Santorum is nothing less than their chance to become the Republican nominee. Should be worth tuning in.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the state of play for each of our doughty soldiers who are still marching toward the fall battle with Team Obama.

Newt Gingrich.  The former speaker needs desperately to recapture some of the lightning in a bottle that helped him win the South Carolina primary after two strong debate performances.  Failure to deliver tonight means that Georgia – the Speaker’s mountain redoubt, his last bunker – is almost certainly lost.  Without Georgia, the case for a Gingrich candidacy is non-existent even to Sheldon Adelson (and Mr. Adelson, if you’re reading, feel free to drop that $100 million off at my house; I’ll burn it – most of it anyway – in the back yard just as colorfully as Newt can do it).

Mitt Romney. A bad debate performance tonight and Governor Coiffure can take the next 6 days off because he’ll have lost Michigan and – possibly – Arizona as well.  Most polls have Santorum up in Michigan (albeit with the margin of error) and closing in Arizona.  This is just the latest in a series of bad news moments for Romney that include getting swept two weeks ago in three state contests, being out-fundraised and having members of the Republican establishment (Mike DeWine for example) jumping ship or are sitting on their hands.  He’s been off-message so long while fighting fires about his relations with conservatives, his lack of connection and authenticity and more that I doubt he knows what his message is supposed to be at this point. Lose Michigan and/or Arizona and Romney loses the only things that got him here in the first place – a shitload of money and some unfocused perception that his winning was inevitable – are gone.

Rick Santorum. Senator Sunshine needs a strong debate performance as well, both to prove that he’s got more staying power than his predecessors as leader of the “I’m Not Mittt” club and to walk back some of his wacky moments over the last couple of weeks.  You know, things like Satan is undermining America, it would be legal to stop the sale of birth control products, Protestants – and the President – are outside mainstream Christian values, public schooling is obsolete, prenatal testing is form of eugenics. Stuff that probably couldn’t  get majority support from the House GOP caucus.  Failure to do so means that the tide has crested and what we’re seeing is the bathtub ring of his candidacy.

I’m popping an extra-big bowl of popcorn.

– Austin

PS – No, I didn’t forget about Ron Paul, just don’t care.  He’s in it no matter what, he still has no chance of winning, tonight he’ll once again be treated like Uncle Teddy in Arsenic & Old Lace whereby the moderators will every once in a while throw him a question just so he can talk about San Juan Hill or digging the Panama Canal or whatever it is we should be doing under his worldview.

Memo to Minnesota Republican Candidates

He spooned with John McCain in 2008, and promised that Minnesota was a purple state that a Republican could win with the help of his considerable home state clout. McCain lost Minnesota by 10 points.

Then, the celebrated Minnesota pol endorsed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, and Emmer used that golden endorsement to become one of the few Republicans to lose, to a decidedly non-charismatic DFL opponent, amidst a tidal wave of 2010 GOP victories.

He ran for President in 2011. Polls showed Minnesota’s favorite son getting beat in his home state by President Obama, despite the fact that the incumbent President was politically weakened by a sluggish economy.

After abandoning his somnolent presidential run polling in single digits, he next laid his North Star scepter on the favorite in the race, Mitt Romney. In Minnesota last night, Romney lost, by 28 points. The well-funded frontrunner ran against a perennial bottom feeder running on a platform of legalizing meth and hookers, in a Republican caucus process dominated by social conservatives. And with Tim Pawlenty leading the way, Romney got pasted.

Minnesota Republicans, trust me on this. If former Governor Tim Pawlenty comes offering to endorse you for anything in Minnesota – dog catcher, class president, Water Buffalo Lodge President, Klondike Kate contest — run. Run very fast.

– Loveland

An Absolute Total Schettino

The truly flabbergasting Susan G. Komen for the Cure fiasco, which boiled to its essence is just another in a long, relentless line of attempts by modern conservatives to politicize every imaginable aspect and service of American life, (most notoriously — the U. S. attorneys scandal)  has already claimed a victim: The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Fund.

As of today, the Fund’s Bushie BFF president, Nancy Brinker, and her board are flailing about trying to reassure everyone from working class sisters of breast cancer survivors to their truly impressive list of corporate sponsors that, A: They really, truly are restoring full funding to Planned Parenthood and not playing cute while they wait for more instructions from right-wing, witch-hunting, anti-choice crusaders, and B: That they can prove they are spending more donor money on breast cancer research and prevention than “protecting their brand”. Either way, I am hereby betting heavily that the organization will have to thoroughly air out its books, divest itself of President Brinker and its VP for Public Policy, Karen Handel, the former Georgia GOP candidate for Governor and avowed opponent of Planned Parenthood, and recalculate its budget to reflect serious declines in giving, as pissed off donors — people who thought some things, like breast cancer prevention, for chrissakes, were above political game-playing — divert their philanthropy either directly to Planned Parenthood or to any number of non-political research labs and universities.

I’ve been out in the Southwest for much of the past few weeks, road tripping through the Mojave when not repainting trim and hanging motion detector lights on my sister-in-law’s garage in Phoenix. As I left town the big news, other than the ceaseless, circling-the-drain, buffoonery du jour of this year’s GOP presidential campaign, was the sinking of the gargantuan cruise ship, Costa Concordia. Of particular fascination was the behavior, soon to be deemed officially criminal, of the ship’s captain, one Francesco Schettino.

By now the entire world knows that not only did Capt. Schettino screw up his most basic job, the piloting of his $450 million ship, mashing it into rocks while apparently showing it off for a buddy, or trying to impress chicks on shore, I’m not sure which, but then compounded his eternal ignominy by setting off in a lifeboat while (at least) hundreds of passengers and crew were still on board. In the annals of the worst examples of command, seamanship and male valor the name of Francesco Schettino will live forever, at least as infamous as, oh, I don’t know Vidkun Quisling and Steve Bartman.

To behold a person or an episode in which at every moment a decision was required the wrong decision was made, with indisputably, unequivocally disastrous results that only bring, justified, shame and disrepute on the person(s) involved is to witness An Absolutely Total Schettino.

So it is with Ms. Brinker, Ms. Handel and the board of the Susan G. Komen Foundation which allowed someone to bring a prominent ideologue like Handel into the organization. But so it also is with … you got it … today’s Republican party.

Fraudulent command and navigation, resulting in entirely predictable foundering (think de-regulated financial markets, politicized cooking of military intelligence, demanding austerity amid a pounding recession, and gridlocking the wheels of governments for months on end for transparently political reasons) followed by an astounding run of shameful, public embarrassments. It’s your modern Republicans … without the snappy captain’s hat and white shorts.

If only, like Captain Schettino, Mitt “I’m not concerned about the poor” Romney and Newt “I’m a historian for hire” Gingrich, could be confined to their home(s) and advised by their attorneys to say nothing until arraignment.

Like Capt. Schettino claiming he was supervising his destroyed ship’s evacuation … while he was either in a life boat or on shore having a cappucino, the modern Republican party, imbued with its lethal fervor of religious certainty and self-righteousness, talk radio bombast and undisclosed billionaires’ lucre (the Dems can only cop to one of that three) has flipped the company cruise liner’s credibility on its side as a consequence of saying … whatever … will save their ass … until either a better lawyer shows up, or their cousin, Fredo, throws a canvas bag over their head and runs them across the Straits of Messina to a Sicilian hill town and a new identity.

The whole party has made a laughingstock of itself. Vain, incompetent and craven. Utterly Schettino. From Mittens and Newt (and Michele and Rick and The Donald and Herman) to Kurt Zellers, Warren Limmer, Steve “The Draz” Drazkowski, Dave Thompson, Amy Koch and Michael Brodkorb here in Minnesota

If there was another word better and more accurate than “disgraceful” for the way Romney and Gingrich have campaigned to date, I’d use it. But the word doesn’t exist. Although, “farcical” would come close if it weren’t for the fact a fat chunk of the general public, like the Costa Concordia passengers trapped below the water line, are prepared to follow Capt. Schettino to their cold, watery grave … if it means never having to call a black guy, “Captain”.

Not that I’m hoping the GOP’s Absolute Total Schettino episode ends any time soon. The whole, gaseous, brawling, whining, prevaricating spectacle makes me feel kind of Italian. Well, Roman anyway. Like at the Colosseum, watching a motley pack of doltish buffoons warm up the lions’ teeth before the real gladiators get down to business.

The Power of Words

Juggernaut. Inevitable. Commanding lead.

We’ll see tonight how inevitable Mitt Romney is. But when Andrea Mitchell called the Romney campaign a juggernaut two days ago, I squawked back to the TV — “He won by 8 votes in Iowa. He got the same percentage of votes as four years ago after running for four more years. Juggernaut?????”

Campaign reporting, especially with all those cable hours to fill, is usually just dogs panting after whatever squirrel’s running through the yard at the moment. Candidates (usually those who are behind) always say there’s only one poll that matters — the election. Romney is assumed to be inevitable because he’s polling ahead in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, because he has a ton of money, and because his opponents are so lame. But things can change in a hurry — Romney’s lead is melting as I type — unless the media keeps broadcasting self-fulfilling prophecies.

Romney could have been labeled a failure after Iowa — four years, millions of dollars, no gain in votes or percentage, stuck at 25%, the majority of voters rejecting him. LBJ won the New Hampshire primary in 1968 with 49.5% of the vote to Gene McCarthy’s 42.4%. But the media called this a loss for LBJ — a sitting president nearly tied by an upstart senator with a bunch of kids campaigning for him. New Hampshire played a huge role in Johnson saying he wouldn’t run for reelection.

Iowa could have been called an embarrassing loss for Romney. His candidacy could have been called wounded. But instead, his 8-vote landslide kept an imaginary juggernaut rolling. I think this is irresponsible inaccurate reporting by the media.

We’ll see how the juggernaut rolls tonight.

New Hampshire has gotten interesting because of the power of words. President Obama hasn’t been able to capture people’s anger about what was done to the economy by speculators in any succinct way. It took a blogger to come up with “We are the 99 percent.” Hugely powerful because of its simplicity.

The New York Times ran front-page stories about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital through November and December. The most comprehensive on Nov. 12, showed exactly what what Bain did in many cases — piled debt on the company, Dade International, killed 1,700 jobs, and left the company no option but bankruptcy. Bain took $342 million for itself. (How’s that for pay for performance?)

So Romney’s Bain record has been out there for anyone to see. Only in the last few days have Romney’s opponents started nailing him coherently for Bain. And it’s simple language that gains traction. “Predatory capitalism.” “Outsourcing jobs.”

And, from the master of invective, the “relentlessly positive” NastyNewt Gingrich, this gem in today’s Times: “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?” Pretty clear, pretty punchy. Better if he were more specific about “manipulate” — kill jobs, lower wages, cut benefits. (And how will any of these hypocritical weasels defend their opposition to effective regulation of the very behavior they are criticizing at Bain once they’re done smacking Mitt over the head?)

“Makes millions off killing jobs. Your kind of guy?” Simple bumper sticker.

Simple clear language — it works.

–Bruce Benidt
(Image from Politico.com)

Go Mittens, Go.

Post-Iowa the factoid that flashed more red and brighter than every other was this: Turn-out was barely 5% greater than four years ago. Call me crazy but I can make the argument that the press and pundit corps — always in need of something to cover and gas on about — is far more interested in the GOP primary circus than the Republicans themselves. After over a year of visits and six solid months of freak show mania, not to mention the $10-plus million Mittens Romney and Rick Perry alone dropped on Iowa media, the so-called rank and file, (in actuality the semi- and totally batshit) couldn’t muster any more anger, rage and enthusiasm than 6000 more people — out of 608,000 registered Republicans. Call it a “record turn-out” if you’re into the whole hype thing. But the percentages tell a much different story.

Since last Tuesday we’ve heard (too much) about the “Rick Santorum surge”, a sudden frothing movement which in the end presents a very odd man as viable competition for Mittens and a credible candidate for … President of the United States.

Please. Neither Santorum nor anyone else is going to get anywhere close to Romney and the nomination. As Robert Reich blogged today, Romney is if nothing else, an avatar for Citizens United.  In a moment when the imbalance of wealth and influence is more vivid than any time in maybe 100 years the Republicans are moving inexorably toward another very odd guy — palpably twitchy in his own skin — who is the walking talking embodiment of “the 1%ers”. Taken further, if the Democrats want to frame the campaign as a referendum on how Republicans have responded to the beat-down of the middle-class over the past decade they could not have invented a candidate more perfect than my guy, Mittens. (My nephew in Denver uses “Mittens”. I like it. It suggests cossetting and protection against harsh elements … with a dash of parental supervision.)

You want a sense of how “odd”? Read this live-on-the-plane report from The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.

The divide between Santorum’s social conservative crowd and Romney’s “he might be able to beat Obama” crowd is stark … deep and wide. But the social conservatives, the anti-gay, you’ll-be-marrying-turtles, or going all “man on dog” and maybe polygamist to boot bunch has no standing in Romney’s Citizens United Super PAC wonderland. Santorum’s Biblically-directed tinfoil hat brigade wouldn’t even recognize Romney’s $500k per pop hedge fund Super PAC-ers as being of the same species … and vice versa.

This of course is old news. The inevitability of Romney has been established for months, despite all the bovine bloviation on cable TV. Likewise the stunning lack of enthusiasm for Mittens.

But as this thing gets serious (post the comedy candidates like Bachmann, Cain, Trump, Palin and, hell, Rick Perry) we are getting a much better feel for … the terms of the choice.

Despite three solid years of hyperbolic messaging not even the Republican base is convinced enough that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim anti-christ to drop everything and spend two hours with their like-minded neighbors voting to stop the apocalypse. More significantly, with the economy showing some actual green shoots (Mitch McConnell has to get back to D.C. and stamp that crap out ASAP!) in terms of manufacturing and employment, Obama has every good reason to double down on, as I say, a referendum on the Republican Congress … the Congress that out-nothinged the Do Nothing Congress of Harry Truman’s era … at a time when more middle class voters than ever expected it to do something … other than obstruct and play sophomoric procedural games.

I say again; clear, visible, bona fide support for the plight and interests of the middle class will be the crux of the choice. Who can make the most plausible case that they’ve done everything they can?

Romney, though not a member of Congress, is a Central Casting caricature of the class that owns Congress. I see Karl Rove is delighted to see Romney set up so well. Rove, now arguably the country’s premier Super PAC salesman has to regard a Romney presidency as a kind of restoration for him and the whole crowd of hedgie-cronies who installed and sock-puppeted George W. Bush for eight years.

This particular choice, Obama (with his billions for Super PAC) or Romney presumes that the Republican social conservatives will allow themselves to be stuffed back into their sound-proof kennels, as they are every election cycle when the Republican money machine has finished exploiting them. Given Rick Santorum’s absolute fealty to the K Street powers that restored him to an upright and lucrative position after being destroyed in his Pennsylvania reelection bid, I can’t see him playing spearchucker for a third party.

Ron Paul, 76 years old and figuring he’s riding the biggest wave he’s ever going to get, is a whole other story. The social conservatives appear to be leery of the geezerly old doctor. Legalize heroin!?  But he has enough semi-anarchic, pot-loving, middle class college kids willing to rattle cages for him that he might just say, “WTF? It’s now or never!” (Lacking Paul’s fans — 21% — the Iowa turn-out would have been a complete face-plant for the party.)

At which point the geezerly doctor will get a call from one of Mittens’ and Karl Rove’s hedge fund guys offering to pay off all his campaign debts if he changes his mind … for health reasons, you understand, or to spend more time with his family.