Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

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

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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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Standing up for ObamaCare

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From the Washington Post:

Americans split evenly on the Supreme Court’s recent 5 to 4 decision upholding Obama’s health-care law, with 42 percent approving of the decision and 44 percent opposing it. But in a significant change, the legislation is now viewed less negatively than it was before the ruling. In the new survey, 47 percent support the law and 47 percent oppose it. In April, 39 percent backed it and 53 percent opposed it.

House Republicans will vote again this week on a measure to repeal the health-care law. In the poll, just one-third of all Americans favor repealing the legislationin its entirety or in part. At the same time, Thirty-eight percent of Americans consider Romney’s support for repeal a major reason to vote for him, compared with 29 percent who say it is a major reason to vote against him.

I say this time and time and time again, but I feel compelled to say it again now anyway: Americans don’t care about policy; they care about comportment. If you look like you know what you’re doing, as long as it’s not something completely crazy, they’ll support it — no matter who the party in charge is. Hell, most Americans don’t even understand policy. I don’t think one could even find 30% of the population that’s capable of answering two or three basic questions about the health care law.

But look what happens when the Supreme Court rules in its favor: suddenly the law isn’t so bad anymore. Same with gay marriage among African-Americans: everyone was freaking out about what Obama’s declaration of support might do to his black constituency, and within days of his announcement, black support for gay marriage skyrocketed (by around 10% in some places, I believe).

This is why the Democrats are such a pathetic party: they still haven’t learned this lesson. They enacted healthcare in 2010, the Republicans screamed “death panel,” and the Democrats retreated. So of course voters hate the law: Democrats looked like they didn’t know what they were doing, and Republicans looked like they did. It was never about actual policy.

For an example of real leadership, even if the policies themselves weren’t necessarily good, Scott Walker ran for office promising to balance budgets, decided to bust the unions, withstood massive public discontent and a recall election, and held his ground and won. That’s balls. But the ballsiest Democrat is still a bigger coward than the weakest Republican (with the exception of Mitt Romney). When will this sad excuse for a party learn to actually vouch for its own ideas? It’s pathetic.

(Rant over.)

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More on same-sex marriage and Romney’s high school “pranks”

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I’m having trouble embedding Daily Show videos, so just take a look at this link to see Jon Stewart saying pretty much exactly what I’d mentioned — but in a much funnier and more sarcastic way —  about how far we’ve come in our national conversation.

Secondly, it turns out that the military did not spontaneously combust or cease to exist or explode into a million pieces due to the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” after all:

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2012 – A new report shows the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law is being implemented successfully in the military, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said during a news conference today.

The repeal of the law banning gay and lesbian people from open military service took effect Sept. 20, 2011. The secretary said he received the report on repeal implementation yesterday, and it shows repeal is going “very well” and according to the department’s plans.

“It’s not impacting on morale. It’s not impacting on unit cohesion. It is not impacting on readiness,” he said.

Panetta said he credits military leaders for effective repeal planning.

“Very frankly, my view is that the military has kind of moved beyond it,” he said. “It’s become part and parcel of what they’ve accepted within the military.”

During the same conference, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he has not seen “any negative effect on good order and discipline” resulting from the repeal.

In response to a reporter’s question of what the military had been afraid of in allowing open service, the chairman said, “We didn’t know.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait at New York expresses some caution (which is different than entirely ignoring it) as to Mitt Romney’s bullying high-school self:

The best way to assess a candidate is not to plumb his youth for clues to his character but to look at his positions and public record. The problem is that this is a harder exercise with Romney than almost any other national politician. He has had to run in such divergent atmospheres, and has thus had to present himself in such wildly different ways at different times, that his record becomes almost useless. There is hardly a stance Romney has taken that he has not negated at one point or another. This makes the fraught task of trying to pin down his true character more urgent, though not any easier.

My cautious, provisional take is that this portrait of the youthful Romney does suggest a man who grew up taking for granted the comforts of wealth and prestige. I don’t blame him for accepting the anti-gay assumptions of his era. The story does give the sense of a man who lacks a natural sense of compassion for the weak. His prankery seems to have invariably singled out the vulnerable — the gay classmate, the nearly blind teacher, the nervous day student racing back to campus. It’s entirely possible to grow out of that youthful mentality — to learn to step out of your own perspective, to develop an appreciation for the difficulties faced by those not born with Romney’s many blessings. I’m just not sure he ever has.

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Mitt Romney: high-school gay bully?

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You’ve probably heard about this by now:

Mitt Romney Steve Pearce event 057

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

I am conflicted about this. One of my least favorite things about contemporary American politics is how irrelevant and pathetic the public discourse has become, and how thoroughly disconnected from the everyday reality of people’s lives the online and TV chatter is. (This frustration is rather nicely captured — although I don’t necessarily endorse the Chris Christie-esque tone of the example he uses — by this piece.)

On the other hand, this 47-year-old story has an odd resonance today, given the struggle for gay rights and the very prominent and ongoing issue of the bullying of gays in schools throughout the United States. It seems to show a whole new and very ugly side to Mitt Romney, taking away what was perhaps his last remaining unequivocal positive: being a “good guy.”

And yet this all seems so primitive at the same time. (The timing is suspicious as well — this appeared in the Post the day after Obama’s announcement on same-sex marriage? Seems bizarre, to say the least.) I mean, this literally happened almost a half-century ago. I constantly rail against the idiocy and irrelevance of criticizing presidential candidates for whichever drugs they did as college kids or how much they drank at social events or who they dated or what pretentious literary criticism they wrote to their female admirers as young, heady academics.

So, as horrifying as this incident assuredly must have been for John Lauber, I’m inclined to give Mitt Romney a break on this one. We’re not dealing with 1965 Romney today. Hell, as we’ve clearly seen, the Romney of today doesn’t even bear any resemblance on major issues to the Romney of just a few years ago, never mind 47 years ago.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that my views on Mitt Romney’s gay bullying are still “evolving.”

UPDATE (5/11/2012 1:48 AM Paris time):

Dish blogger (and prominent same-sex marriage activist) Andrew Sullivan comes to this somewhat similar conclusion:

Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?

Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.

And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.

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The Republican reaction to Obama on same-sex marriage

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Yesterday, I was rendered nearly speechless (nearly; come on, you didn’t really expect actual speechlessness from me, did you?) with pleasure at President Obama’s long-awaited and extremely tardy announcement of the end of his “evolution” on same-sex marriage. (Granted, this was a completely manufactured and artificial “evolution,” since he supported gay marriage as long ago as 1996 and only changed it when he became more politically prominent — but an “evolution” nonetheless, in the same Orwellian tradition of linguistic manipulation that helped make such ludicrous things possible as “enhanced interrogation techniques” being something other than torture. OK, I’m getting way off on a tangent now. Back to Planet Earth.)

Anyway, the point is that I was extremely happy — giddy, even — over the President’s remarks. But what makes me almost happier, in a less viscerally affecting way but in a calmer and more long-term perspective, is the virtual absence of strong public opposition to this. It’s incredible how muted the response has been. It really is hard to believe how far the country has moved on this in recent years. In 2004, President Bush was campaigning on his support of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nationally. Eight years later, a sitting President just announced his support for same-sex marriage, and Republicans don’t even dare to mount a serious rebuttal. This lack of a response is, to me, even more newsworthy than the announcement itself. As the New York Times noted:

Conservative social activists and groups that oppose same-sex marriage have been vocal in their disdain for Mr. Obama’s announcement. And advisers to Mr. Romney said in television interviews on Thursday that he would campaign on the issue of his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides,” Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.”

But Republican officials on Capitol Hill seemed eager to shift the conversation away from the social issue and back to blaming the nation’s economic struggles on Mr. Obama’s policies.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, repeatedly deflected questions about Mr. Obama’s new position on same-sex marriage at his weekly news conference. He said he believed that marriage should be limited to “one man and one woman” and then quickly flicked back to the economy.

This is notable. Same-sex marriage has, quite suddenly, become a topic that Republicans are gradually realizing they don’t want to be seen publicly and vigorously opposing. They’d rather talk about just about anything else. And that is a good sign.

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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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