Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
Tag: politics
-
Fired from the polity
-
But America Didn’t Listen
Connor Friedersdorf on how we should have listened to George McGovern, now nearing death:
Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who’d be alive today if the country had listened to McGovern rather than his opponents about the Vietnam War. Think of all the veterans who’d have been better off. Think of how many Vietnamese civilians would’ve been spared death by napalm. But America didn’t listen.
The country would eventually come to see Vietnam as a mistake.
But ours is a people who are dismissive of men who lose presidential elections. We behave as though the electoral outcome discredited their ideas, even on matters where they’re ultimately proved right.
Indeed. Now take all the ideas above about Vietnam and war, and replace them with global warming. The analogy to Al Gore is equally, if not more powerful, and even more consequential.
-
Break the seal of shame
… should Obama fail, the people who will suffer under a triumphant Republican administration will not be abstract to him; they will be down the street. The poor black women who will doubtlessly find their access to contraception troubled will be degrees closer to Obama than to any other presidential aspirant. That 47 percent whom Mitt Romney will surely treat as the loafers he considers them to be will not be a subject of academic study, they will be his fellow parishioners. Barack Obama has spent a life breaking barriers, and should he lose, in any part, because he neglected to prepare — to work hard — he will break the seal on a shame which few can fathom.
-
Willard Mitt Romney, right now. (Artist’s impression.)
-
Not Loyal Enough
Steve Coll compares Chris Christie’s keynote speech to Obama’s in 2004, and finds Christie sadly wanting.
Obama came to Boston as an unknown and left as a rising star. Christie came to Tampa as a rising star and obviously hoped to acquire Obama-like momentum as the Republican Party’s “truth teller,” a more salable alternative in competitive “purple” states than Paul Ryan will be in the next election, if Romney loses this one. (Christie even wore a purple tie.) …
More interesting than the hard truths Christie purported to deliver from the podium in Tampa were the truths he revealed implicitly: that he is unoriginal, divisive, and not loyal enough to be worthy of the platform Romney gave him.
In a way, this piece reminds me of the only thing I think I’ll ever agree with RedState’s Erick Erickson about, when he called out Jon Huntsman for being untrustworthy. His reasoning was that he proved his disloyalty as a person and as a representative of the United States when he was obviously planning to set himself to challenge the president who had appointed him to his ambassadorship; a president who, one presumes, was relying on him to do that job without having to worry about being undermined by an electoral opponent.
This is similar, in that it calls out Christie for failing to do the job to which he was appointed, and instead using it as a platform for his own advancement. The logic goes, I think, that if you can’t do what you’re supposed to do here, of all places, and you look to overshadow and even undermine the guy who put you where you are (in that moment a least), why on Earth should you be seen as worthy of the office you’re blatantly gunning for?
-
The One Way that Weird Eastwood Thing Could Screw Things Up for the President
If any single speaker at the Democratic National Convention decides to, even slightly, make fun of Clint Eastwood.
The media and faux-outrage machine would collapse on the Time Warner Cable Arena like a ton of bricks, each of which would then be thrown through every Democratic office-holder’s window with threatening notes attached.
And I fully expect this to happen. Leave it to the Democrats to find the one rake laying in a huge open field and step directly on it.
-
GOP Festival of Lies, Day Two
Once again, on day two of the Republican National Convention, it was ominous how few mentions of the nominee himself were made. It wasn’t quite as stark as it had been on day one in the speeches of Chris Christie and others, but notable nonetheless. I asserted that the first night’s speeches were evidence that the speakers were all setting themselves up for future campaigns, as they had collectively (and perhaps independently) come to the conclusion that Mitt Romney was a sinking ship.
I still think that’s true, but I also think the mostly-Romneyless speeches from Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan last night were also indicative of an intentional strategy to be as vague as possible about Romney and what he stands for, and instead deluge the viewer with platitudes and fuzzy imagery. Romney the man is not sellable, but generic Americanness is. If you remember that the intended audience for the prime time speeches is not the politically tuned-in or the base, but the handful of uninformed undecideds, that strategy makes perfect sense.
Remembering the intended audience also explains Paul Ryan’s shameless, brazen speech that was absolutely overflowing with lies. To anyone who is even a little bit informed, it was astounding how blatantly he simply told lie after lie about himself and the president. But to those uninformed undecideds, well, they’ll never know that nothing he said was true. So for a speech intended for those ears and eyes, it was probably a big success. Which is a horrible shame, and very damning of American society.
Update: As Dan Amira wrote:
Most of the millions of people who watched the speech on television tonight do not read fact-checks or obsessively consume news fifteen hours a day, and will never know how much Ryan’s case against Obama relied on lies and deception. Ryan’s pants are on fire, but all America saw was a barn-burner.
-
My Summation of the First Night of the GOP Convention
This was a night of Republican politicians selling themselves for future campaigns. They are writing this one off.
#gop2012— Paul Fidalgo (@PaulFidalgo) August 29, 2012
-
The Myth of the Tight Presidential Race
The headline Washington Post chooses for its new poll showing a tight national popular vote race between the president and Mr. Romney says:
But this is wrong in what it implies. The headline, and much of the chatter around it, will tell you that the race is a tie. But popular votes don’t decide presidential elections, Electoral College votes do.
To get a better look at the actual state of the race, just go to FiveThirtyEight for Nate Silver’s forecasts, and you get a much different picture:
So sure, the popular vote is almost certainly “neck and neck.” But the actual presidential race is not.
Once again, there is a bag, and Obama’s victory is to be found within it.
-
Strange, Mindless, Near-Racist
My paraphrase of The Economist on Romney (words in bold used in the actual piece):
“We’d love to love you, but you’re a strange man with mindless policy positions who says near-racist things. Please tell us you’ve been kidding.”
-
In Case You Needed Further Proof That Obama Has it in the Bag…
Former Florida governor, Charlie “I Must Find out Where They are Going So I Can Lead Them” Crist, endorses the president.
-
Right off the bat, Romney hits us with some unscripted juice. “My, oh my, you guys are great to be out here with this rain,” he says. He has declined the use of an umbrella and is getting rained on with the rest of us. He grins, jaw like a crescent moon. “This guy here with the orange shirt—boy, that thing is turning a diff…a deeper color of orange here this morning.” The man’s shirt is turning a deeper color of orange due to moisture saturation, is the phenomenon that Mitt Romney is pointing out. Is there an emotional clue here? Not to his essential self, perhaps, but the remark does suggest a man who does not often behold damp textiles, who perhaps comes from a land where the laws of materiality and hydrology are different from our own.
Wells Tower: Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul? – GQI cannot begin to express how much I loved this piece.
-
“What the Hell is a Simpson Bowl?”
Andrew Sullivan, whose writing I generally adore, is, I think, really wrong on an important aspect of horse-race analysis for the presidential election. His prescription for Obama at the Democratic Convention:… if I were to offer a single piece of advice to the campaign, it would be to use the convention to declare that he would sign Bowles-Simpson as written if it came to his desk. He’d instantly own the fiscal center, isolate the GOP’s extremism, and reaffirm his credibility on the deficit.
The paradigm can still be shifted.
… What matters is that Obama should declare his first priority on being re-elected would be a grand bargain on the lines of Bowles-Simpson. Force Romney to say no.
This is how Obama can win the Beltway pundit class, which is absurdly and needlessly obsessed with fantasies of utopian bipartisanship and centrism. David Brooks and Tom Friedman would enter a trance state of moderate-nirvana.
But the Gang of 500 doesn’t have the votes to put Obama over the top in Ohio. (Though perhaps if they all lived in Florida in 2000, but never mind that…)
The people Obama needs to reach are not “centrists” or budget wonks. What he needs to reach is a tiny sliver of the electorate, weirdly termed “independents,” which is distinguished mainly for being generally too ignorant about politics and policy (not necessarily through any fault of their own) to have made up their mind until the last minute.
Imagine you’re an underemployed blue collar worker in the Rust Belt, or a confused octogenarian retiree in Florida. If you see on your Yahoo News page, or hear on your 6 o’clock news that Obama has embraced something called “Simpson-Bowles,” the first thing you’ll wonder is whether those bowls feature Homer or Bart.
Okay, that’s not fair. But you get the point. The pundit class has this idea soaked into its collective conscience that those who decide elections are fixated on who has a better plan for the budget. Yes, these undecided voters do care about the state of their entitlement programs, about the security of our financial system, about their rate of taxation. But things like “the deficit” and “the budget” are abstract concepts that, if they stir emotions, do so because they’ve been stirred by ideological screamers whose audiences have already decided who they’re voting for, regardless of any understanding of why they’re angry.
Of course, the message can sink in that Obama is the guy who now says he’s going to take a serious approach to balancing the country’s checkbook. But Romney will say the same thing. No one on the sidelines is saying, “Well, clearly Simpson-Bowles is the superior plan, being centrist and all.” It’ll be a wash on the specifics, and, as usual, it will really come down to which guy the undecideds like more.
And that’s another reason why, ladies and gentlemen, Obama continues to, more or less, have it in the bag.
-
Twisted Sister joined a list of other artists telling Romney/Ryan to stop using their music, but this is especially interesting to me, because how do Romney and Ryan not realize that they are, in fact, the “it” we’re no longer gonna take?
Jed Groettum
pav alexander 