It’s almost hard to believe how tone-deaf this candidate really is. And then he says this:
“You know, I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” but the President ought not to be taking such a “divisive,” “envy-oriented” approach.
Because you never apologize for America, right Mitt? Congratulations, GOP. You get the candidate you deserve.
Via Andrew Sullivan, Dan Amira expects this message to flop:
This is not a gaffe, really, just a particularly stark reflection of Romney’s true beliefs as he’s repeatedly expressed them. Still, it’s a ballsy way to handle issues of income–power inequality, particularly when he’s already being portrayed as an unfeeling, opulently wealthy corporate monster by Democrats and Republicans alike. And Romney might soon find that the 77 percent of Americans (including 80 percent of independents) who believe there is “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations” and the 61 percent (including 61 percent of independents) who say that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” don’t find his ideology very relatable.
“Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.”
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein is stunned by the radicalism of the GOP presidential candidates:
If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be:
Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.
It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.
These folks are actually talking about repealing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970s.
They’re talking about abolishing Medicare and Medicaid, which passed in the 1960s, and Social Security, created in the 1930s.
They reject as thoroughly discredited all of Keynesian economics, including the efficacy of fiscal stimulus, preferring the budget-balancing economic policies that turned the 1929 stock market crash into the Great Depression.
They also reject the efficacy of monetary stimulus to fight recession, and give the strong impression they wouldn’t mind abolishing the Federal Reserve and putting the country back on the gold standard.
They refuse to embrace Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has been widely accepted since the Scopes Trial of the 1920s.
One of them is even talking about repealing the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax and the direct election of senators — landmarks of the Progressive Era.
What’s next — repeal of quantum physics?
Full editorial here.
The Problem of ‘Low Information Voters’ in a Fragile Democracy
Another former Congressional staffer weighs in on Mike Lofgren’s must-read essay “Goodbye To All That,” which I posted earlier this week:
Like Mike Lofgren, I am a retired Congressional staffer who worked for a House Member from 1985 until January of this year. Unlike Lofgren, I did not retire voluntarily; my boss, a moderate Democrat, lost his race for re-election last November. I found myself agreeing with virtually everything in Mike’s article and immediately forwarded it to a bunch of my friends, some of whom remain working on the Hill.
Privately, many of us who have worked in Congress since before the Clinton Administration have been complaining about the loss of the respect for the institution by the Members who were elected to serve their constituents through the institution. I don’t think people realize how fragile democracy really is. The 2012 campaign is currently looking to be the final nail in the coffin unless people start to understand what is going on.
One thing that especially resonated with me about Mike’s piece is the importance of “low information” voters. The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters’ minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.
The media likes to call this group “independents,” which implies that they think so long and deeply about issues that they refuse to be constrained by the philosophy of either party. There may be a couple of people out there who fit that definition, but those are not the persuadable voters campaigns are trying to capture. Every campaign is trying to develop its candidate into an easy-to-remember slogan that makes him or her more appealing than the other guy. Actually, because negative campaigning is so effective, they are more often trying to portray the opponent as more objectionable (“I guess I’ll vote for the crook because at least he won’t slash my Medicare”).
You can read more on James Fallows’ page at The Atlantic; he has been following this crucial debate in earnest since the Truth-Out article first made waves. This is a conversation we all need to be having.
Crowd Cheers Death Penalty at GOP Debate
Watch the audience at last night’s republican debate break into spontaneous applause for the execution of 234 people by Texas Governor Rick Perry. When Brian Williams asks Perry if he has ever “struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those [prisoners] might have been innocent,” Perry answers no, despite evidence that at least one of those people, Cameron Todd Willingham, was innocent.
It has been alleged that Perry purposefully impeded the investigation of Willingham’s case by replacing three of the nine commission members in an attempt to change the commission’s findings, a charge that Perry disputes. Willingham was denied a writ of habeas corpus and was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004.
[When] Perry is asked about the two-hundred and thirty some people he’s executed on death row during his governorship, the audience bursts into applause. …I submit to you that this moment is perhaps the most telling since George W. Bush left office; that the modern Republican party is not only intellectually bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well. The conservative movement and the Fox News and talk radio media empire it has built up around itself is not only ethically decrepit but morally atrophid. As Andrew Sullivan noted, “any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join. This is the crowd that believes in torture and executions.” Say what you will about Democrats, but no crowd of Democrats would cheer the execution of over two hundred of their fellow citizens, even if stories like that of Cameron Todd Willingham did not further blemish the record.
Recommended Reading: “Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”
“Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult” is a must-read feature by Mike Lofgren, a former Congressional staffer who spent 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
[…]
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”
[…]
This constant drizzle of “there the two parties go again!” stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote?
Full article here.
A LESS COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE
George W. Bush sound-alike Rick Perry of Texas, surrounded by well-wishers at the Iowa State Fair on Monday. Via NYT.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
