July 2012

Kevin Drum brought the above e-mail to my attention. Apparently it’s from a Tea Party group. No big surprise, in any way.

But it’s still seems to me worth pointing out how the world looks from inside the far-right mind; and it’s telling, I think, their vision of Obama’s dystopia.

It’s race war. Barack Hussein Obama takes from the hardworking (white) in order to give out goodies to slackers and freeloaders (non-white).

Theda Skocpol’s no doubt unsurprised.

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Republican Party media elites are nervous. They’re worried that an eminently winnable election is slipping from the Right’s grasp, that the contemptible President Obama will claw and scrape his way to a second term, and that a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rewrite the American social contract will be lost. Most of all, they’re worried about Mitt Romney. They think he’s blowing it.

First to throw their hands up in the air and wave them around like they really, really do care was The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board. In a denunciation of Team Romney’s handling the fallout from Chief Justice Roberts’ Obamacare ruling, the Journal accuses Romney of an “unforced error,” one that:

is of a piece with the campaign’s insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity. Mr. Obama is being hurt by an economic recovery that is weakening for the third time in three years. But Mr. Romney hasn’t been able to take advantage, and if anything he is losing ground.

Damning as that reads, the authors don’t tap into their peak-disappointment reserves until the very end:

[C]andidates who live by biography typically lose by it. See President John Kerry.

The biography that voters care about is their own, and they want to know how a candidate is going to improve their future. That means offering a larger economic narrative and vision than Mr. Romney has so far provided. It means pointing out the differences with specificity on higher taxes, government-run health care, punitive regulation, and the waste of politically-driven government spending.

Mr. Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat. So far Mr. Romney is letting them down.

And today, no less a leading light in Republican punditry circles than Bill Kristol weighs in with a nearly identical op-ed, warning Romney that a strategy featuring a monomaniacal focus on the economy is safe, conventional, and likely to end up in defeat:

The economy is of course important. But voters want to hear what Romney is going to do about the economy. He can “speak about” how bad the economy is all he wants—though Americans are already well aware of the economy’s problems—but doesn’t the content of what Romney has to say matter? What is his economic growth agenda? His deficit reform agenda? His health care reform agenda? His tax reform agenda? His replacement for Dodd-Frank? No need for any of that, I suppose the Romney campaign believes. Just need to keep on “speaking about the economy.”  […]

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to (narrow) defeat.

Behold the rightwing message machine in all of its graceful, seamless, cross-integrated glory!

There’s much more smoke here than fire. Yeah, it’s not been a great week or so for the Romney folks, but the “mistake” that’s got the Journal editors so agitated — Team Romney’s clumsy and inconsistent position on whether or not the mandate is in fact a tax — is the kind of thing that voters don’t care about one lick. It’s so frivolous, in fact, because to a large degree the criticism Romney’s folks are enduring is of a meta variety. The worst kind.

To lifelong politicos and reporters, not having a coordinated message in response to the biggest Supreme Court decision since 2000 is amateurish. And it is! But here’s the thing: voters don’t care about this kind of inside baseball. They just don’t. What’s more, they’re not even paying real attention yet. Not coincidentally, this supposedly campaign-threatening misstep is occurring during the dog days of Summer, when reporters are bored and with precious little to make copy of until the Party Conventions have begun. Unless it inspires the Romney brain trust to make some wild decisions, this nontroversy is just that.

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The economic indicators as of late have been discouraging, so the winner of this year’s Presidential election is still very much in doubt. What has long been and remains clear, however, is that if Mitt Romney wins, it’ll be despite himself.

A new investigative report from Vanity Fair is latest bit of evidence. Tackling head-on the lesser, non-Mormon of the two elephants in any room Mitt Romney and campaign reporters happen to be in, Nicholas Shaxson’s piece attempts to flesh-out where, exactly, Romney keeps his money. With offshore accounts, blind trusts, and all manner of tax-dodging tricks and chicanery that I can’t even begin to fully comprehend, Shaxson finds Romney’s finances to be even more opaque than the Republican candidate’s public image. Needless to say, Team Romney did not agree to cooperate with Vanity Fair on the piece.

It’s an unfortunate habit, the Romney campaign’s refusal to cooperate with a media they’ve long since determined to be implacably hostile. Putting aside whether the conclusion is correct — I don’t think it is; the media has its biases, but they’re not always easily placed on the left/right axis — Romney’s stonewalling of the media is rather self-defeating. Obviously, these stories are going to keep coming out. And as a recent dust-up with The Washington Post showed, ramping up damage control only after ignoring an unflattering report can ultimately compound the problem.

Above all else, if the Romney brain trust can’t introduce a new talking point to the candidate’s repertoire, maybe they’re best off “no comment”ing themselves all the way to November.

Prime example — how Romney’s handled criticisms of his off-shore financial holdings and the management of his personal finances more generally. The response from Boston has been clumsy, alternating between two not-especially-compelling messages. At first, criticizing Mitt Romney for his previous career (and its stupendous economic rewards) was tantamount to criticizing capitalism itself [1]. Next, the refrain was always a variation hereof: Mitt Romney has done nothing illegal [2].

In both cases, the attacks’ insidious subtext— that Mitt Romney is Other, his lifelong privilege and success having made him distant and removed — is not only unchallenged but reinforced.

Romney does himself no favors when he assumes the mantle of Capitalist in Chief. Not because Americans don’t like capitalists. They do. But they want their capitalists to be grateful and well-meaning. Ideally, fabulous wealth is earned through providing the world with a positive good: Facebook, the iPhone, alternative energy technologies, breakthrough medicines, etc. These are the products of entrepreneurship Americans prefer to focus on.

When Romney humblebrags about his great success as a private equity executive, the problem isn’t merely that the listener can’t help but reflect on how different her life experience is from Romney’s. She soon thinks, too, of how Romney made his millions. He did it through a very modern form of capitalism, through moving around money and placing bets. In its generalities, it’s a trade quite common among Romney’s fellow .01 percenters — but it’s not the kind of wealth-creation that makes Americans feel confident that the winners have won for everyone’s benefit.

Hiding behind the technical legality of Romney’s many offshore holdings and tax evasions (which according to Shaxson are not always clearly legal) is worse still. In this defense, the alien nature of Romney’s vast wealth is no longer implicit. By adopting the No Apology swagger to brush off whispers about dummy corporations and Swiss accounts, Boston unintentionally  reminds people not only of how different Romney is, but how people like Romney, in the words of Ben Walsh are “not just in another tax bracket… [they're] playing a different game.”

The Obama campaign’s media outreach has shared the Vanity Fair article with an almost breathless joy. Coming on the heels of a Washington Post scoop on Bain-run companies “pioneering” outsourcing, Vanity Fair has probably confirmed all of the Romney high command’s worst suspicions about the media. Eric Fehrnstorm, Romney’s consigliere and a former journalist, already derives much of his political self-defition from his hatred of the media-politico class. One would think Romney’s nascent ties with rightwing media will now concretize and grow.

Nurturing a countervailing media environment, one more sympathetic to Republicans and orthodox conservatism, is a smart longterm investment. But restricting Romney’s appearances to platforms that at one time or another championed Andrew Breitbart will not help the candidate elude the President’s attacks. If the economy falls back into recession, this won’t make a difference. But if campaign fundamentals — GDP growth, consumer confidence, and no terrorist attacks — hold steady to Novemeber, 2012 will be the rare election in which tactics were decisive. Republicans don’t want voters thinking about the Cayman Islands when they’re standing in the voting booth.

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’ve by now read Jan Crawford’s CBS blockbuster on Chief Justice Roberts’ decision to switch sides for the Obamacare ruling. If you haven’t, the short version is thus: At some point, Roberts was signed-on with the Court’s four other conservatives to nix the mandate. He even, it seems, wrote an opinion to this affect. But then one of either two things happened—Roberts couldn’t persuade his fellow Republican-appointeds to take a deep breath and refrain from killing the law entirely; or Roberts simply changed his mind about the mandate’s constitutionality and felt himself compelled to uphold the measure as constitutional according to Congress’s taxing authority.

However he got there, right before he high-tailed it to his “impregnable island fortress,” Roberts ended up standing next to the Court’s four Democrat-appointed Justices. As the very existence of the CBS piece testifies, the Court’s conservatives were not amused.

It’s worth reiterating how abnormal is this CBS article. As The New Republic recently explained, the Supreme Court simply does not leak. That’s not the same as to say after-the-fact explanations aren’t shared with the media. But these revelations usually reach the public through the memoirs of a retired Justice, a book by a former clerk, a retiring politician leaving a plum spot on  a Judiciary Committee, and so forth. Unless the Court is about to experience an unexpected departure, the usual explanations for how we’ve come to know of the Roberts reversal don’t hold. Someone — likely one of the four conservative Justices, directly or indirectly — is trying to shame Roberts.

Perhaps the biggest hint in this regard is simply the framing of the piece. Roberts’ volte-face could have been inspired by any number of factors, followed-through due to any number of motivations. As Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler (who is basically the only person who saw the ultimate outcome of the case, however dimly) has noted, the facts available to us right now could neatly fit into any story-telling constellation. Beutler recommends everyone simmer down. Unfortunately, when CBS serves-up red meat to apoplectic and perplexed conservatives looking for an effigy to burn, there’s not much chance the heat on Roberts will soon desist:

Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the court’s historic decision. He kept it for himself.

Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it. […]

Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As chief justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the court, and he also is sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public.

There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court – and to Roberts’ reputation – if the court were to strike down the mandate. Leading politicians, including the president himself, had expressed confidence the mandate would be upheld.

Some even suggested that if Roberts struck down the mandate, it would prove he had been deceitful during his confirmation hearings, when he explained a philosophy of judicial restraint.

It was around this time that it also became clear to the conservative justices that Roberts was, as one put it, “wobbly,” the sources said.

It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.

You almost certainly don’t need my assistance, but just in case you missed it, here’s the subtext of the above: John Roberts is a weak-willed RINO who cared more about what the liberal media thought than what the Constitution demanded. And just in case you were wandering your way towards the mistaken belief that Roberts might’ve genuinely had a good reason to buck the GOP, “a source with knowledge of the conversation” between Roberts and “one conservative justice” assures you that, no, the Chief Justice’s explanations left either Alito, Scalia, Thomas, or Kennedy “unsatisfied.” The chances of that source not being one of the four ultimate dissenters? Ahem.

It’s easy to shrug your shoulders and call it all so much sour grapes, of course, but while I was ultimately happy with Roberts’s decision — or at least the real-world consequences of his decision — his rightwing detractors are not without fair cause for consternation. Because, really, there’s a reason so very few reached the same conclusion as the Chief Justice. Exclusively on its intellectual merits, Roberts’ argument is, shall we say, sub-optimal. Jonathan Chait went pretty deep on this:

There were numerous arguments for the constitutionality of the law. The argument that it could be uphold under the power to tax struck me as convincing… but not completely airtight. You could plausibly deny the mandate was a tax, whereas the arguments denying it as a function of the Commerce Clause were insanely tendentious. Liberal lawyers were unanimously supportive of the Commerce Cause justification and divided on the taxing arguments. Conservative lawyers were divided on the Commerce Clause and united on the taxing authority. The overlap of legal minds willing to accept the fantastical right-wing arguments against the law but also to accept the weakest liberal argument for it contained nobody at all, until Roberts himself stepped forward to claim this unoccupied territory.

Crawford’s report will enrage conservatives. (The conservative justices and/or clerks who spoke with her probably leaked the story precisely in the hope that it would.) They’re right to be enraged. The essence of law is to decide cases on the basis of what the law says, not on the basis of personal preference or some other consideration. Roberts seems to have corrupted his role as a judge, deciding upon the outcome that made him most comfortable and working backward to a justification for it. The epithet legal scholars use for this sort of thing is a “results-oriented decision.”

What we’re left with is a SCOTUS decision that, in its cravenness, unlikelihood, and impenetrability is not only a dopplegänger of the health care law it upheld, but a mirror image of the hideous, seemingly endless process through which Obamacare was written and passed. By comparison, this November’s election, which will finally decide Obamacare’s fate, looks like a simple and serene walk in the park. 

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