Tag Archives: 2012 American presidential election

Was that noise we just heard the last nail in Romney’s coffin?

Politics,

Probably not. But these comments — spoken at a private event and captured secretly on camera — will certainly bring him closer to the brink:

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 the 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…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XnB0NZzl5HA]

What do you do when your prime minister is an extremist?

Politics, , , , , , , ,

From David Remnick at the New Yorker:

It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the heads-up.)

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Censoring the news: this only happens in tyrannies and American presidential campaigns

Media, Politics, , , , , , ,

The New York Times nonchalantly (and unknowingly) begins writing its own obituary as a serious journalistic enterprise:

The push and pull over what is on the record is one of journalism’s perennial battles. But those negotiations typically took place case by case, free from the red pens of press minders. Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.

The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.

From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”

It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews.

Good thing the Times isn’t the most influential paper in the world or anything…because acquiescing to this absurd self-censorship would really be embarrassing if that were the case.

Perhaps this is a good entry point for the new public editor. Good riddance, Brisbane.

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Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and 1999: Should I stay or should I go now?

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At first glance, this ongoing saga seems an awful lot like one of those perfectly constructed and completely irrelevant bits of campaign “scoops” that have no effect whatsoever on a candidate’s ability to govern. And from the Obama campaign’s strategic standpoint, that’s basically what it was, and a masterful job at that. But the problem goes beyond the overarching campaign themes — outsourcing of American jobs, profits accruing to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, etc. — because it now involves directly contradictory statements made by Romney in SEC filings and public comments. It will be interesting to see if this story has staying power or if the press moves on to more exciting things, like what Kim Kardashian is doing with her summer.

In any case, it is a definitive example of the Obama campaign’s strategic mastery. The overall fight over outsourcing is, in many ways, pretty frivolous, since the exchange of labor in the U.S. for cheaper labor abroad is a fairly well-known and — more importantly — unavoidable long-term impact of globalization. But it sure riles up some of Obama’s key constituencies, so there we go. Meanwhile, Romney has a scandal on his hands because he fell for the trap of being too cautious: he didn’t want to appear remotely involved with outsourcing, so he said he wasn’t in charge of Bain Capital after 1999. Maybe he should have just owned it right from the start.

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What luck looks like: a primer in three parts

Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , ,

Part I:

Nick Hanauer’s taxable income is, he tells me, “tens of millions. In a bad year it can be $10 million.”

His parents made good money in the pillow trade, and after college he set up a few okay businesses. But then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, “You two are going to be friends.”

The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had on hand—$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos, and the business was Amazon.com.

Part II:

The “Moneyball” story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with  luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky…

Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.

Part III:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

She continues: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The 2012 presidential election will be, in part, about how much we as a country ascribe to the importance of luck in our everyday lives. Universal healthcare is, in many ways, a hedge against bad luck. To an extent, all entitlement programs are about mitigating the volatile luck of the draw.

Americans have never really been believers in luck, and that’s part of the reason we became who we are: no excuses, best foot forward, all that jazz. But it’s also given us a massive blind spot, and it’s in times like this that the problem becomes glaringly obvious.

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And speaking of presidential elections…

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…get ready for more of this in the upcoming months:

“Certain precincts in this county are not going to vote for Obama,” said John Corrigan, clerk of courts for Jefferson County, who was drinking coffee in a furniture shop downtown one morning last week with a small group of friends, retired judges and civil servants. “I don’t want to say it, but we all know why.”

A retired state employee, Jason Foreman, interjected, “I’ll say it: it’s because he’s black.”

This could get ugly. One of the more interesting aspects of this general election matchup between President Barack Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, is the fact that they both suffer from two very similar trust deficit problems with large swaths of the American public.

Governor Mitt Romney of MA

First, both Romney and Obama are seen, by significant portions of the public, as un-American. For Romney, this is due to his Mormonism, which 22% of Americans last year cited as a disqualifying factor for the presidency. For Obama, this is due to his father’s Kenyan heritage and his own race, as well as lingering doubts as to his birthplace resulting from repeated lies being perpetrated by some right-wing groups.

Secondly, both candidates supported, and subsequently passed, universal healthcare coverage laws in their respective constituencies: the entire country for Obama, the state of Massachusetts for Romney. And although Romney has vowed to repeal “Obamacare” as soon as he is elected President (which may become a moot point next month if the Supreme Court rules the law unconstitutional), the fact that he passed a virtually identical bill while governor certainly doesn’t help his credibility.

And it is this tension — between the candidates’ political weaknesses and their desire to attack those same perceived weaknesses in their opponents — that should turn what might otherwise be a rather boring general election contest into riveting political theater. It will be interesting to see Obama subtly play up his Christianity and Romney do the same with his, well, whiteness. In terms of who has the edge, I’d give Romney a slight advantage here. Despite the fact that Obama projects an infinitely “cooler” public persona, a significant portion of the American public is still reticent (or racist) enough about his identity to such an extent that Romney can exploit this discomfort for electoral gain. Conversely, while Obama can try to very gently remind Americans of Romney’s Mormonism (to be clear, I find it ludicrous and disgusting that anyone wouldn’t vote for Romney based on his Mormonism, but that probably won’t stop Obama from trying), he likely won’t score as many points with this as Romney can with the “un-American” verbal grenades he’ll be tossing at Obama.

Cropped version of File:Official portrait of B...

On health care, however, I think the situation is flipped. Obama has the advantage here, as Romney has made Obamacare’s repeal a central cog of his presidential election campaign and yet passed basically the same thing in Massachusetts. His problem is one of credibility, especially given the massive attention being paid to the questions of whether he is sufficiently conservative and whether he has a real “core.” Obama, on the other hand, will likely be in a superior position, since it’s a law he passed as President and he is clearly interested in keeping it on the books. His weaknesses are twofold: 1) although individual elements of the law remain popular, the overall legislation is not; and 2) Obama has shown a surprising (and absolutely infuriating) tendency to back away from his own legislative achievements. If he wants to own Romney on the health care question, he needs to be unequivocal in his support for the health care bill he passed. Of course, Romney can then use this firmness to try to showcase how Obama’s out of step with the American public, but again, he’ll run straight into the credibility buzz-saw (since he passed the same thing at the state level).

This could end up being a very delicate tap-dance in the debates. Meanwhile, the TV ads will likely get really ugly, on both sides.

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