Mitt Romney

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Richard Grenell, We Hardly Knew Ye

by Elias Isquith on May 1, 2012

EfM

Steve Benen weighs in on the recent (utterly inside baseball) news that, due to his stubborn unwillingness to not be gay, Richard Grenell has lost the privilege of being Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman:

The larger significance of this is what it tells us about Romney’s relative weakness in the face of pressure from his base. The former governor hired a qualified former Bush administration official; the right said gay people are bad people; so Romney quickly accepted his own staffer’s resignation, despite the fact that the aide had done nothing wrong on the job. Romney was comfortable with Grenell’s misogynistic tweets before getting the job, but uncomfortable with anti-gay animus from the right after Grenell was already on the job.

If Romney had more courage, he would have stood by his staffer, and told the religious right to get over it. But since that backbone doesn’t exist, and Romney’s afraid social conservatives’ hatred of the president won’t be enough on Election Day, Grenell gets to experience firsthand Romney’s fondness for firing people who provide services for him.

Let’s ignore the anti-Romney cheap shot at the end there (this is one of those occasions when I don my Serious Person hat and note that Romney’s point about firing people was, in context, rather anodyne) and focus instead on why, according to Benen, Romney folded: Because he’s “weak” and lacks “courage.”

Romney never struck anyone as being the real-life version of the John McCain maverick myth (circa 2002), so I’m definitely not going to argue to the opposite of Benen. But isn’t it more likely that a basic cost-benefit analysis was run by Team Romney’s high command, and it was a cost-benefit analysis whose results said that there was much more to lose by sticking with Grenell than to gain by standing by him?

What I mean is, if Romney were a figure more revered by the Christian base — a Rick Santorum or a Michele Bachmann — isn’t it likely that he would’ve stuck with Grenell, knowing that he had built up enough goodwill with the foreign policy expert’s antagonists to weather the storm? (It’s certainly more likely than Santorum or Bachmann ever hiring Grenell in the first place!) And, really, what did Romney have to gain by sticking with Grenell other than making people like Steve Benen, who would never vote for Romney; or David Frum, who will pooh-pooh the move plenty but vote for Romney nevertheless, momentarily happier? Not much.

I guess one person’s rationality is another’s cravenness; but it doesn’t strike me as any real view into Romney’s character, this firing. What is the larger significance of this event, however, is what I find most worrying about a potential President Romney: It reveals the degree to which Romney will answer to the GOP base’s beck and call. It suffices to say that, if he becomes President, Mitt Romney will not have his own Nixon-to-China moment.

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Obama Campaign Drops The “Swiss Bank Account” Bomb

by Elias Isquith on May 1, 2012

Here it is, the first attack ad on Mitt Romney from the Obama campaign, made for a TV audience:

The Obama campaign has bought $458,883 in airtime so far in Ohio, $88,455 in Iowa and $72,845 in Virginia for ads running May 1 to May 7, a buyer source says.

I might be imagining things, but it seems to me like the President’s endorsement at the beginning is a bit more somber than is usual — and the photo its juxtaposed against shows Obama not quite frowning, but definitely not flashing his usually expansive and toothy grin. Are the Obama folks hoping to telegraph the President’s deep, deep resignation over having to run as a typical Democrat, tossing aside 2008′s rhetoric of coming together and kumbaya in favor of the dreaded words “a call center in India”? Again: I could be off the deep end on this one.

But in any event — look at the disparity in buy-time between Ohio and the other two states! 2012 really is going to be a rehash of 2004, isn’t it?

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The Democratic Base: Ready To Go

by Elias Isquith on April 4, 2012

Public Policy Polling released a poll yesterday showing Democrats more excited for the coming election than Republicans, by a margin of 57-46. Their take-away should be music to David Plouffe’s ears:

Last year enthusiam [sic] was on the GOP’s side. Now the equation has clearly flipped.

Digging in more deeply on our most recent poll by far and away the group most excited about voting is African Americans, 70% of whom say they’re ‘very excited’ to cast their ballots this year. The two groups tied for the second most enthusiasm with 58% saying they’re very excited to vote? Liberals and those under 30. Mitt Romney may win this fall but he’s going to have to win independent voters by a huge margin to do it. Unlike in 2010 the Democratic base is fired up and ready to go.

If Obama spends the whole campaign delivering speeches more or less like the one he delivered yesterday — and that does indeed seem to be the gameplan — then, barring an unforeseen catastrophe, there’s little reason to suspect these numbers won’t increase.

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The Sasquatches Of American Politics

by Elias Isquith on March 29, 2012

Romenybots

The Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold delves into one of the most hard-to-find subcultures in American politics — the world of the Mitt Romney fanatic:

Mitt Romney mania will do strange things to a person.

In Arizona, it has moved one woman to write poetry: “Mitt Romney is his name / He wants to help America / ‘Fix It’ is his game.” In Virginia, it led a grandfather to set off crisscrossing the country in a 14-year-old truck.

On the Internet, it led a man with a criminal past to fake his name and organize people for a candidate he called “a better man than I’ll ever be.”

And here, in a suburb near Tampa, it caused a 42-year-old business executive to spend her Wednesday nights as a volunteer DJ, talking up Romney on low-budget Internet radio. Romney Radio.

“He’s a fixer of things. He likes things to be right,” Dixie Cannon said into the microphone one night last week. She struggled to explain how strongly she felt. “I use the term ‘love’ as something that comes from my heart. . . . I fell in love with Mitt Romney.”

These are the sasquatches of American politics: rumored, hoped-for, so elusive that they can seem imaginary.

They are Mitt Romney’s superfans.

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Eternal Return: The GOP Primary Continues

by Elias Isquith on March 8, 2012

So here we are on Anti-Climactic Wednesday, mere hours removed from what turned out to be Not So Super Tuesday, and the primary that just. won’t. die. continues to, well, refuse to die:

Mitt Romney won the delegates, but not necessarily the argument.

His quest to win the Republican presidential nomination has always resembled a detailed, methodical business plan. Mr. Romney, who spent much of his life fixing troubled corporations, must now decide whether steps are necessary to repair his lethargic candidacy.

Mr. Romney had hoped that a string of Super Tuesday victories in contests from Vermont to Alaska would effectively bring the Republican race to a close.

But he found himself winning over Rick Santorum by only the slimmest of margins with almost all the votes counted in Ohio, the most coveted primary of the night, while losing other contests across the South….

Mr. Romney had hoped a commanding victory over Mr. Santorum in Ohio would add another Midwestern battleground state to his tally and provide new latitude to begin directly engaging Mr. Obama… But the outcome of the contests on Tuesday, while allowing him to amass more delegates than any of his rivals, did little to resolve the questions about his ability to connect with voters, especially conservatives.

I feel deeply sorry for the scores of journalists who must continue now to soldier onward, following the campaigns as they limp their way further into the great well-known (a.k.a. the Romney coronation), and who not only have to endure weeks more of hearing Romney speak-sing national folk-songs — he’ll be doing “Rocket Man” by the time of the convention —  but must also strain to find something about this interminable ordeal worth writing.

In truth, this was going to be a longer post. But this is how little I can manage to care about this primary right now: it sat, half-written, on my desktop for perhaps as much as 8 hours. Now I’m looking at the oncoming train that is midnight — and, with it, the start of the day after the day after Super Tuesday — and I’m realizing that I might as well just post the damn thing, since I wrote 300 or so words already, and get back on the horse tomorrow by writing about a topic actually worth a damn.

So, yeah. You win, GOP primary. Uncle.

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Is Mitt Romney An Egomaniac?

by Elias Isquith on February 4, 2012

Mitt

So some guy that I’ve never heard of before, but who used to work for Rep. Bachmann, that paragon of competency, has been canned by Team Romney for getting too much attention for supposedly being the reason Mitt performed so well in the latest debate. With something this inside baseball and meaningless, you know it’s got to come from Politico; and if it comes from Politico, you know that the story is written with the spin baked-in, as this one is. The take-away we’re supposed to take away is that Mitt got a wee bit miffed by all the plaudits going to someone other than himself, and thus the advisor in question found himself on the wrong end of the axe.

Seeing the story along said lines, here’s what Digby had to say in a post titled, “Mitt Romney is an egomaniac”:

It’s not like Romney hasn’t sucked in these debates and it’s really no slam on him that he needed help. If anything, I was pretty impressed that he could master new techniques like that as quickly as he did. For the top guy to be irked because someone’s getting credit for helping him is a very bad sign. It means the top guy has issues. Big ones.

That very well may be the case. And I should note that Mitt has generally shown a propensity to be a control freak details man, and the way he’s comported himself whenever either a competitor or a journalist has challenged him has given us much reason to conclude he is a man not especially comfortable with being challenged and not especially inclined to do much about that fact.

But, I’ve got to say, it seems to me just as or even more probable that what we’re seeing here is a bunch of big shot Romney aides feeling very, very threatened and doing whatever they can to ensure they remain adjacent to the throne, rather than some big shot newbie. Now, what this would say about the quality or loyalty of said Romney aides — that they’d allow the media to conclude it was the candidate who got all sensitive over having to share the spotlight — is another matter. And in some ways, I suppose, it would be better optics for Mitt if it was indeed he who cut off his nose to spite his face on this one.

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Mitt’s In The Money

by Elias Isquith on February 3, 2012

Mitt

It’s a big of a “dog bites man” story, I suppose, but it still seems worth mentioning — Mitt Romney is raising a very large sum of money from a very small number of people:

A quarter of the money amassed by Romney’s campaign and an allied super PAC has come from just 41 people, each of whom has given more than $100,000, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure data. Nearly a dozen of the donors have contributed $1 million or more.

The preponderance of mega-rich supporters poses a political challenge for Romney, who has struggled for weeks over questions about his vast wealth, his history as a private equity manager and a series of gaffes that seemed to highlight his privileged station. He stumbled again on Wednesday when he told a CNN interviewer that he was “not concerned about the very poor, because they have a safety net.”

Some of Romney’s biggest supporters include executives at Bain Capital, his former firm; bankers at Goldman Sachs; and a hedge fund mogul who made billions betting on the housing crash. These and other donor details follow the release last week of Romney’s tax returns, which showed millions held in the Cayman Islands and other overseas havens and a tax rate that is far lower than that paid by most American workers.

And I know I could be characterized as an apologist for what I’m about to say, but on this issue, Obama is better than he has to be:

The president has acquired nearly half of his campaign war chest from small-money donors, raising more from contributions of $200 or less than the Romney campaign has brought in overall, disclosure data show. Romney’s GOP rivals also have raised a larger proportion of their money from small donors.

And that doesn’t even take into account his apparent stubborn (and, I’d agree, unwise) refusal to use a Super PAC of his own to the utmost.

Now, the obvious first comment to make in response to the report that Mitt Romney’s campaign will be one for and by the .1% is that this is potentially very bad politics, indeed. Romney might very well respond as he has thus far to all such attacks: “I will not apologize for being successful.” But, of course, his wealth — in and of itself — is not the problem. Greg Sargent on what is the problem:

No one is denying that big money’s corrosive influence over our politics impacts both parties. But the emerging larger picture on Romney’s side takes this all to another, almost surreal, level. Taken together, it all seems so out of sync with the public mood that it’s hard to know where to begin. And yet here we are — this is who the GOP appears set to nominate at this particular economic and political moment.

What gets lost in this little back-alley of the Election 2012 conversation is that every President of our time has been a man of, shall we say, great resources. Why multi-millionaire Mitt Romney’s supply-side extremism is more objectionable than was multi-millionaire Ronald Reagan’s, or multi-millionaire George H.W. Bush’s (who, admittedly, was rather a squish on the whole “voodoo economics” thing), or multi-millionaire Bob Dole’s, or multi-millionaire George W. Bush’s, or multi-millionaire John McCain’s — that I can’t explain. (Well, that’s not true; I can but the explanation — a recession + the difference between $10 million and $250 million — won’t make it seem any less fundamentally stupid.)

But whatever — the narratives that come to define candidates during Presidential campaigns are always at least a little ridiculous; and Romney does have the patrician air that Americans really hate. His prep-school patina, rather than his bank statement, is what might sink him come November, but tying it all together with that nearly unfathomable number certainly won’t hurt. Maybe between now and then Team Romney will smarten-up enough to grab a bunch of potemkin supporters and have them donate their comparative pittances, thus raising that total number of donors and lowering that average donation.

Lost in the shuffle and fireworks of an election, however, is the fact that the kind of campaign Romney’s running right now is the vanguard of the post-Citizens United future. And as we’ve seen from the Democratic Party in the decades concurrent with the death of American unionism and the resurgence of American corporate political largesse, pols go where the money leads ‘em. Do you really think Andrew Cuomo’s going to say no in 2016 when his friends from The Street come calling?

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The More The GOP Contenders Debate, The More They Stay The Same

by Elias Isquith on January 27, 2012

Romney

Once Wolf Blitzer had, remarkably, found a way to further insult the intelligence of his audience — asking the candidates why their wives would be the best First Lady* — I figured it was just about time for me to stop watching the debate and do any number of other things with my evening. Besides, I’d already seen the first hour or so (however long it was; it’s hard to keep track of time when you’re drinking, which, this being a GOP debate, I was) and witnessed Mitt Romney most definitively put an end to Newtmentum.

The whole debate went pretty terribly for Newt, but either this or the moment when he awkwardly tried to his attack-the-moderator shtick, to diminished returns, was the low point.

The amateur political scientist in me rebels at the idea of putting as much stock into the debates as I am, but I think it’s undeniable that Gingrich has lived (and died) almost entirely off of his debate performances. His appeal was a supposed ability to humiliate and silence President Obama during a series of “Lincoln-Douglas-styled” debates (eye-roll); and that ability was founded upon twin planks. One, he could defend himself against imagined but no doubt scurrilous attacks from the President (whom the South Carolina audience saw in Juan Cole); and two, he’d be able to take it to Obama forcefully and unapologetically.

Well, in this back-and-forth with Mitt, he failed in both tasks. Not only did he wilt in the face of Mitt’s unctuous onslaught (probably to some degree out of surprise, but also because he’s a textbook bully), but he failed miserably in counter-attacking Romney, opting to take a high road that he had no right to claim on grounds temperamental or electoral (he was far from a prohibitive favorite in the Sunshine State). Topping it all off is the fact that as far as I could see, Newt almost never made eye contact with Romney — not when he was attacking him, nor when he himself was being attacked. We’re social creatures and as that cliché says, 90% of our communication is non-verbal. Voters are judging candidates as much (probably more) by what they look like as what they say.

So, yes, Newt did terribly and I think it’s fair to say — finally — that his candidacy is effectively over. He’ll notch a respectable number in Flordia, I imagine, and he’ll run some more cutthroat attack ads; he won’t go quietly into that good night. But he’s finished.

The flip-side of the narrative has become one about Romney somehow exploding out of his consistent pattern of mediocrity in these debates and flashing signs of a newborn and hard-won talent that could give the President real problems come fall. I’m not sold. I thought Romney did indeed come off as more of a human being than he usually does, but that’s because he was legitimately desperate. For the first time, he didn’t have that unbecoming air of smugness, that condescending, paternalistic smile. He was, for the first time, acting as if he believed he could lose. And it looked good on him.

But I think what’s mostly got people excited here is the thrill of the new. Romney had been so unwaveringly disciplined, such an automaton, that any slight divergence from his chosen path was bound to be well-received, especially by a press corps and commentariat that has long since become worn-out with these debates and with what has been in many ways a rather dull primary in general. A useful example, I think, is to remember those handful of moments every year during which the President supposedly flashes some anger and reveals some fire. People then, too, get all worked up, as if Obama had announced himself the next Jesse Jackson. It never happens.

Remember: these are extremely successful people; the likelihood that they’ll stop doing that which they believe has gotten them this far? Not high.

Romneys

Another thing I’d keep in mind when analysis Romney’s performance is the fact that, interspersed throughout his otherwise likable performance were still those clanging moments of intense inauthenticity and outright lying. His claim to not have seen his own ad — an ad from his campaign, not Super PAC, so it included the “I approve this message” boilerplate — was not only absurd and insulting, but it was a stupid move that he’s already tried (and failed) to pull off before! He had a similar slip into old habits in an exchange with Gingrich during which he tried to claim that, because his investments in Goldman, Sachs are part of a blind trust, he should not be held accountable:

Romney answered the charge this way: “First of all, my investments are not made by me. My investments for the last ten years have been in a blind trust, managed by a trustee. Secondly, the investments that they made, we learned about this, as we made our financial disclosure, had been in mutual funds and bonds. I don’t own stock in either. There are bonds that the investor has held through mutual funds.”

Now the problem — which, if you’re a follower of Romney, you can probably already guess — is that someone with a lot of credibility vis-à-vis high-end investment says that Romney’s wrong on this one. His name? Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney defends his investments in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere on the grounds he can’t control money in a “blind trust.” But in 1994 Romney was attacking his opponent, Senator Ted Kennedy, over his blind trust’s investments, calling the move “an age-old ruse.”

 

 

*This, by the way, was a totally subtle and not at all sexist way for Blitzer to allow the Not Gingriches the opportunity to brag about their longstanding relationships, as if the solidity of one’s marriage is just another consumer activity, like investing in Goldman, Sachs, that an aspiring candidate must defend before the masses.

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Thoughts On The GOP Debate That I Did Not Watch

by Elias Isquith on January 19, 2012


I did not watch tonight’s debate, so I did not see this “live,” as it were. But one thing I can tell you is that I don’t give an expletive about what Newt Gingrich does or doesn’t do with his johnson. And I must say, as a habitual hater of CNN — a most desperate network that seems to exude a clueless desperation with every high-profile opportunity it can get — I was absolutely unsurprised to find that John King, a man who makes Chuck Todd appear a paragon of journalistic substance and integrity, decided to start off the festivities with the most frivolous, degrading question imaginable.

I’ve also read (and now seen/heard) that Mitt Romney got a bunch of boos for this answer — and, yes, this is a blog deeply indebted to Talking Poins Memo:


It’s a weird tact for Romney to take. I know I’m biased (blah, blah, blah; I’ve said this before) but I honestly don’t think this is going to come off well with a general audience, this “I won’t apologize for my success” business. I doubt that many Americans begrudge someone for their success — I certainly don’t — but the question is whether or not they’re willing to recognize that the deck is stacked against the majority who are not quite so lucky; and whether or not the candidate is seeking to remedy this situation.

In the abstract, this need not be an issue that the Republican candidate is unwilling to discuss in honest and compassionate terms. But for whatever reason, Mitt Romney seems almost fundamentally incapable of at once owning his enormous success and empathizing with the millions of people who don’t sit atop equivalent riches. When he deals with this issue, he comes off as either scared (as he did here with the “Democrats will be mean to me” shtick) or, more frequently, petulant and defensive.

He should take this opportunity to pivot to a talking point about how he wants all Americans to achieve as he has, and how he knows the best way to do it is to unleash their potential by allowing them to compete in a truly unfettered free-market, unencumbered by Big Government. It’s a line that worked with an almost magical efficiency for Ronald Reagan; and I see no reason why it can’t, if delivered with sufficient sincerity (a big “if” as concerns Mitt), similarly flatter swing-voters. I think, eventually, he’s going to figure this out — but it speaks to the campaign’s semi-complacency, their serene confidence in their eventual victory, that Team Romney hasn’t yet bridged this gap.

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Bain: Makes a Man Take Things Over

by Elias Isquith on January 13, 2012

Romney

Last night, I watched the anti-Romney 30-minute “documentary” from a Gingrich Super PAC, “King of Bain,” and I must say that — save the periodic forays into lowest-common denominator xenophobia — one would think it the product of an ardent Michael Moore fan. As Huffington Post‘s Jason Linkins says, “[I]f you screened this before an Occupy encampment, it would almost certainly draw a thunderous ovation.” If you’ve got even the slightest inclination to brush aside the aggregate benefits of capitalism and look at the system through a moralistic lens, this is propaganda that’ll resonate.

Andrew Sullivan’s right:

[W]hat makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn’t just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That’s the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain…

I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he’ll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.

Sully is, of course, in the tank for Obama; and I suppose it’s not unreasonable of someone to shrug off his analysis because of that. There’s definitely a voice in my head that’s advocating a contrarian take on the Bain issue. The political media and blogosphere is so exultantly describing the many ways in which this is Something That Matters and is a Game Changer, it’s hard not to wonder whether or not it’ll end up looking like a tempest in a teapot.

But if you look up there at your browser’s address bar, you’ll note that you’re not at Slate, so I’m going to resist these contrarian impulses and rely on that most sober analyst, Nate Silver. He thinks this is, indeed, something that matters:

Arguments over job creation are going to be central to this year’s general election. It will be harder for Mr. Romney to defend his laissez-faire positions if Democrats can roll out clips of Republican partisans attacking him. Already, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, the former head of the Republican Governors Association, has described Mr. Romney as a “vulture capitalist.” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, has said that Bain Capital has an “indefensible” business model… Such attacks may seem more credible when made by Mr. Romney’s fellow Republicans rather than by Mr. Obama or one of his surrogates….

What’s unusual about the attacks on Bain Capital is that they might be more compelling to independent voters than to Republican primary voters. Politics ain’t beanbag, and sometimes the front-runner will be attacked by any means necessary, even if it might produce collateral damage. But rarely has there been an attack that had such uncertain potential to harm a candidate in a primary but such clear potential to harm him in the general election.

Silver is right to be wary of the idea that this shot to the gut is going to appreciably help Gingrich. I’d imagine that there are more than a few South Carolinian Republicans who are, whether they’re conscious of it or not, more than willing to find any reasonable excuse they can not to vote for the formerly moderate Mormon. But I think in the aggregate, a lot of GOPers are going to accept Romney’s rhetoric that these attacks are little more than an attempt to “put free enterprise on trial.” As Will Wilkinson noted recently, by and large, loyalty is an important value for people on the political right; and what Newt’s doing here is unquestionably selfish and myopic. (Shock! Newt Gingrich — not a team player!)

But there’s just no way — no way — that that line is going to fly in the general election. Maybe if this were 2000 or any time before 2008′s financial crisis. But it most certainly ain’t, and while the American electorate is quite a distance away from endorsing a candidate who promises to enact the dictatorship of the proletariat, there’s definitely room for a pol to argue — as the Gingrich “documentary” does — that there’s a bad capitalism and a good capitalism. Silly as such a distinction sounds, there’s no doubt that it’s a potent wedge the Democrats can wield in 2012. And if you were trying to find someone to represent this so-called bad capitalism, you couldn’t really do any better than the cold, arrogant, and entitled-seeming Romney.

Overall, what’s going to be most important for the coming Presidential election is whether or not the economy is going in the right direction during the six months or so preceding judgment day. But I’m not a polisci absolutist, and I think these novelistic elements do matter in an election — especially a close one — even if their impact is frequently overstated. What Newt, Perry, and Huntsman have already put to tape cannot be undone; their inevitable walk-backs won’t matter much. You can say you spoke against Mitt Romney before you spoke in favor of Mitt Romney, but the Super PAC ads won’t care much, and neither will the average low-information swing-voter.

All in all, I think the conventional wisdom on this is right: Barack Obama, arguably one of the luckiest politicians in recent American history, has every right to keep feelin’ lucky.

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