Month: October 2012

Mr. Etch-a-Sketch rides again

by David Atkins

Having finally discovered that attempting to play entirely to the conservative base was going to get him crushed, Mitt Romney has clearly decided to pretend that the last year never happened and that voters were born yesterday. That was the debate strategy that left the President flummoxed at how to respond to a man who shamelessly lied about his positions of just a week ago. With “Severe conservative Mitt” a sure loser, “Bill Clinton Mitt” has suddenly emerged from his chrysalis. And guess what? “Bill Clinton Mitt” just now realized that his statements about 47% of Americans being worthless loafers was completely wrong:

Mitt Romney may be the most dishonest politician I’ve ever had the misfortune of watching. This is a man who seems to literally believe that there is no consequence at all for shamelessly contradicting himself from one week to the next.

Those who believe that Mitt “won” the first debate hands down seem to believe that Romney is justified in his complete cynicism about the process and the electorate. Those who believe, as David Axelrod and I do, that Romney mortgaged long-term political pain for a 24-hour news cycle win, have just a little more faith in this creaky old electoral system.

American democracy is broken. But it’s not that broken.

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Second chances

by digby

Because you need this:

Via Jess Zimmerman at Grist who writes:

Probably my favorite part is when the ducks keep running away from the water in what, as one Woodstock worker points out, looks just like a Benny Hill routine. Or maybe it’s the part where the sanctuary workers go for the “tough love uncle” approach to swimming lessons, and just chuck the birds in the pond. Or maybe it’s watching that first duck figure out that the water is amazing. Or maybe it’s watching ALL of them figure out that the water is amazing!

Sometimes it’s the little things that make your day.

Update: And, by the way, you should feel no guilt or shame for enjoying this. It’s good for your concentration. Really.

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Are the whining plutocrats’ tender feelings hurt that Mitt said Dodd-Frank is a big kiss to NY Banks?

by digby

I’ll be very curious to see if any of the whining Masters of the Universe will have themselves a good old fashioned cry when they realize what that mean old Mitt Romney said last night. This is the sort of thing that usually sends them into a tizzy:

Dodd-Frank was passed. And it includes within it a number of provisions that I think has some unintended consequences that are harmful to the economy. One is it designates a number of banks as too big to fail, and they’re effectively guaranteed by the federal government. This is the biggest kiss that’s been given to — to New York banks I’ve ever seen. This is an enormous boon for them…

Look, we have to have regulation on Wall Street. That’s why I’d have regulation. But I wouldn’t designate five banks as too big to fail and give them a blank check. That’s one of the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank. It wasn’t thought through properly.

My goodness, that sure sounds disrespectful to me. Why calling Dodd-Frank a big “kiss to New York Banks” might even rank up there with that horrifying “fatcat” insult President Obama slung at them that one time. It’s enough to made a Wall Street banker call in sick, put on his jammies and curl up in the corner with a gallon of Rocky Road and a great big spoon. I mean, it’s just so hurtful.

Somehow I just have a feeling they aren’t going to pull their money though. As friendly as Obama has been to their cause, he’s not a real member of the club like ole Mitt. They just can’t quit him no matter how abusive he is in public. They know deep down, he really loves them.

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Romney begins to pay the price

by David Atkins

I said last night that Romney lost the debate last night, or won a Pyrrhic victory at best. One of the reasons I pointed to was the fact that he lied continually in a surreal way, and would pay the price:

Romney’s lies will come back to haunt him. Part of the reason the President may have been caught off guard was Mitt Romney’s hard tack to the center, essentially throwing the modern conservative movement under the bus and pretending that his last year’s worth of campaign statements never happened. On every issue from Romneycare to cutting taxes for the rich, the challenger basically pretended that he was the Mitt Romney of 2002 again.

It may be that Romney was trying to shake the etch-a-sketch starting tonight, or it may be that he was trying to win over the undecided voter who pays little attention to news except to watch one or two debates. If the latter, then it won’t matter to him how much fact checkers rip apart his statements…

But the Obama campaign may see fit in the coming weeks to put Romney’s sudden pretenses at being a moderate tonight alongside his actual speeches and statements from no more than a few days ago. That will have the effect of reinforcing Romney’s image as an ambitious used car salesman who will say anything to get elected. And that will hurt him as voters go to the polls.

Less than 18 hours later, that pushback has already begun:

Expect to see much more of this.

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QOTD

by digby

From Michael Moore:

“‘You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it,’observed Peter Teeley, press secretary to Vice President Bush. If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, ‘so what? Maybe 200 people read it or 2,000 or 20,000.'”

– New York Times, November 1, 1984

How many times do these people have telegraph exactly what they’re doing before people pay attention?

They admit they don’t really care about deficits, that supply side economics is a fraud, that they create their own reality, fact-checking is for suckers and on and on. And yet everyone keeps acting as if they are serious people with sincere intentions.

Republicans admit to being liars in order to get elected all the time. Why doesn’t anyone believe them?

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The Romney surrogates are all waaay over-stimulated

by digby

Obama’s performance last night may have been somnambulant but Romney’s aggressive lying has put his surrogates on the defensive. It started last night with this amazing exchange between Rudy Nineleven and Chris Hayes:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This one was epic. Watch John Sununu lash out at Andrea Mitchell like a rabid dog:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I’m beginning to think that all this “tweaking” talk doesn’t mean what we thought it meant. These people are all very … over-stimulated.

The Romney campaign has been very open about their total disdain for the truth throughout this campaign. Recall this, from the campaign pollster:

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Last night they certainly made that clear.

Here is just a partial list of the many posts this morning outlining Romney’s numerous lies in last night’s debate. At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes Romney’s Successful Debate Plan: Lying Mitt Romney’s debate performance: ‘Mostly fiction’ The First Debate: Mitt Romney’s Five Biggest Lies Romney lied about pre-existing conditions during debate Debate Debrief: Romney vs. The Truth Romney’s big Medicare lie takes center stage in debate

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Let’s not forget that Mitt made his fortune picking winners and loser. And he picked plenty of losers.

by digby

Kevin Drum looks into Romney’s green jobs claim last night and find that he was lying. (I know, hard to believe …)

Here is Mitt Romney last night, criticizing the green energy loan guarantee program that was part of the stimulus bill:

You put $90 billion into green jobs….And these businesses, many of them have gone out of business, I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in have gone out of business.

Close! The DOE 1705 program has approved 33 loans worth about $16 billion. So far there have been three failures (Solyndra, Beacon, and Abound), which works out to a failure rate of….

9%.

By dollar volume, these loans will cost a maximum of about $600 million if the government ends up on the hook for the entire loan amount. That comes to maybe 4% of the total. By other measures, the failure rate is less than 1%

Let’s talk about failure rates, shall we?

Much of the firm’s profits was earned from a relatively small number of deals, with Bain Capital’s overall success and failure rate being about even. One study of 68 deals that Bain Capital made up through the 1990s found that the firm lost money or broke even on 33 of them. Another study that looked at the eight-year period following 77 deals during the same time found that in 17 cases the company went bankrupt or out of business, and in 6 cases Bain Capital lost all its investment. But 10 deals were very successful and represented 70 percent of the total profits.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for Mr Bain to attack the government for investing in some companies that lost money. Romney made his fortune picking winners and losers. That’s his business model. He’s lying about the green jobs initiative (of course) but he’s also acting as if he’s never had a losing proposition in his life. In fact, he’s the one who broke even on the picks, not the government.

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Tweaking our lives

by digby

All I can say about the debate last night is that Romney looked like he accidentally drank President Obama’s double espresso. But I think what was really surprising about it was the fact that Romney lied so much to make himself appear moderate, yet did it in a way that was so aggressive his bloodthirsty base won’t mind. It’s a pretty savvy strategy.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s strategy seemed to be based on the bizarre idea that people are yearning for him to agree with Mitt Romney.

For instance, this:

LEHRER: All right? All right. This is segment three, the economy. Entitlements. First — first answer goes to you, two minutes, Mr. President. Do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?

OBAMA: You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker — Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill. But it is — the basic structure is sound.

(I guess Joe Biden was just speaking out of turn again…)

Let’s examine that “tweak” shall we? First of all, the tweak is commonly (although perhaps erroneously) said to be based upon the recommendations of what’s known as the Greenspan Commission. (That’s right, the man who just a few years before had written a letter to the New York Times literally decrying “parasites” and saying they should perish, headed a commission to “save” Social Security.)

If the proposed fix follows the same logic as 1983, it will raise the payroll tax on everyone and raise the retirement age. The hike in the payroll tax was sold as necessary to shore up a short term shortfall in the system and then have the baby boomers pre-pay into the system for their own retirement (as well as pay for their parents and grandparents as had always been done.) The higher retirement age came about because the congress eventually decided that they needed to deal with a possible shortfall far into the future and couldn’t get any consensus to raise the cap. Any of this sound familiar?

Now they are talking about “tweaking” the way benefits are calculated, which will probably hit the baby boomers, mostly women, who manage to live the longest, the hardest. Of course, if they don’t fix that once they see the misery they’ve caused among the oldest and most vulnerable part of the population, the oldest Americans of the next generation will suffer just as much.

These “tweaks” always look unexceptional on paper. But if you are one of the millions of people who are looking at a very meager income in your elder years, barely enough to survive really, a “tweak” becomes a life-threatening blow.

The problem with this entire conversation is that Social Security is already inadequate. It’s barely enough to keep the elderly out of grinding poverty and compared to other industrialized nations it’s a joke. Benefits need to be raised not cut. But the grand success of the relentless fear mongering from deficit fetishists like Alan Greenspan and Pete Peterson over the years is that the entire conversation revolves around the idea that the system is so unstable that the only possible “compromise” is to agree to “tweak” benefits and pare them back over time — until the system loses its essential value to the American people and they can finally turn it into an investment vehicle.

The president says he’s ready to “tweak.” And we know that Mitt Romney can hardly wait to take a meat ax to it. If he were to win, I’m guessing the conservative Democrats in congress would rush to jump on his bandwagon. (They certainly always have before.) So, it would appear that your best chance is to vote for progressives who will stand up to either Romney or Obama when it comes to Social Security.

You can contribute here to our Blue America 12 House candidates and here to our Senate 2012 page, for Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Bernie Sanders.

Update: After being chastised for failing to recognize that president Obama has always talked up bipartisanship, let me put back in a line I initially removed from this post because I thought it was too snarky:

I felt like I was watching a replay of 2008 with all the Reagan worship and blurring of differences.

I know that some people thought Obama was very liberal in 2008. I wasn’t one of them.

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CNN “Snap Poll” only polled Southern Whites Over 50. No joke. (CORRECTED WITH UPDATE)

by David Atkins

Update: It appears that this isn’t quite so nefarious, after all. Apparently, every other subsample polled was hit in numbers that were in keeping with statistical sampling, but too few to make reliable projections about that subsample’s behavior. Still, as Kevin Drum notes, it’s a little odd that the particular subsamples that did have enough responses just happened to be the most conservative demographic samples in the country. But there’s no question from this and other polls that most voters seemed to believe that Romney came out the winner.

But to say that this episode with the CNN poll somehow proves that “both sides do it” when it comes to fact-free delusions is the willful artifice of a holier-than-thou beltway press unwilling to call a spade a spade.

TheSilverMonkey at Daily Kos makes a great catch on that CNN snap poll showing Mitt Romney winning with 67% of undecided viewiers. Check out these curious internals:

Total Men Women White Non-White
—– —– —– —– ———
Obama 25% 20% 30% 20% N/A
Romney 67% 74% 59% 71% N/A
Neither 3% 2% 4% 3% N/A
Both 5% 4% 6% 5% N/A
No opinion * * * 1% N/A
Sampling Error +/-4.5 +/-6.5 +/-7.0 +/-5.0
18- 35- 50- Under 50 and
Total 34 49 64 65+ 50 Older
—– —– —– —– —– —– ——
Obama 25% N/A N/A 26% 22% N/A 24%
Romney 67% N/A N/A 63% 69% N/A 67%
Neither 3% N/A N/A 1% 4% N/A 3%
Both 5% N/A N/A 9% 4% N/A 6%
No opinion * N/A N/A * 1% N/A *
Sampling Error +/-4.5 +/-8.0 +/-7.0 +/-5.5
Under $50K No Attended
Total $50K or more College College
—– —– ——- ——- ——–
Obama 25% 37% 20% N/A 23%
Romney 67% 54% 72% N/A 67%
Neither 3% 2% 4% N/A 3%
Both 5% 7% 4% N/A 6%
No opinion * * * N/A 1%
Sampling Error +/-4.5 +/-8.5 +/-6.5 +/-5.5

Demor Indep- Repub- Lib- Mod- Conser-
Total endent lican eral erate vative
—– —– —— —— —– —– ——-
Obama 25% 51% 17% 3% N/A 34% 6%
Romney 67% 35% 75% 94% N/A 55% 91%
Neither 3% 4% 3% 1% N/A 3% 1%
Both 5% 9% 4% 2% N/A 8% 1%
No opinion * 1% 1% * N/A * 1%
Sampling Error +/-4.5 +/-8.0 +/-8.5 +/-8.0 +/-8.5 +/-7.0
North Mid- Sub-
Total east west South West Urban urban Rural
—– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–
Obama 25% N/A N/A 22% N/A 34% 20% N/A
Romney 67% N/A N/A 71% N/A 57% 72% N/A
Neither 3% N/A N/A 3% N/A 3% 3% N/A
Both 5% N/A N/A 4% N/A 6% 5% N/A
No opinion * N/A N/A 1% N/A * 1% N/A
Sampling Error +/-4.5 +/-8.5 +/-8.5 +/-7.0

It’s hard to read in this format, but if you follow the link and read carefully, something shocking is apparent. The poll sample was

• 100% white
• 100% from the South
• 100% over the age of 50
• Mostly male

Seriously. All older white Southerners, mostly men. And Romney’s favorability rating among the respondents prior to the debate was twelve points higher than the national average.

Now, it may well be that the audience of debate watchers skews more conservative than the general public or even the likely voting universe. But it’s not entirely older, Southern whites. That’s just malpractice in the first degree.

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Three Reasons Romney Lost the Debate

by David Atkins

The pundits and a majority of uncommitted voters have spoken: according to them, Mitt Romney won the wonky yet substanceless snoozefest that was the first Presidential debate of 2012. We are told that Romney seemed lively, warm and aggressive, and that the President seemed distracted and defensive. Perhaps that’s true. The President’s neoliberal policy approach and failure to adamantly defend Social Security and progressive budget priorities didn’t help. The news media certainly wants a closer horse race between the candidates for ratings, and the snap post-debate poll numbers favoring Romney will help them try to deliver that.

But for all the hype, Mitt Romney still came out the loser tonight for three reasons:
1) The “Big Bird” moment. What debaters look for when they “win” is a moment that can be replayed again and again in advertisements afterward against the opponent. Think Bush’s “Hard Work” line in 2004, or Dukakis’ lack of emotion over his wife’s hypothetical murder in 1988. While Obama may not have outshone Romney on stage, Obama didn’t give Romney any of those moments. But Romney did give the President one–and a big one. He directly stated not only that he would fire Jim Lehrer–right in front him–but that he would fire Big Bird, too. Big Bird and PBS instantly became trending topics on Twitter. Watch for the Obama team to do ads highlighting Romney’s desire to continue subsidies for big oil and other big corporations while killing Big Bird’s job. That will have a much more lasting impression on the race than the 24-hour news cycle generated by the debate itself.

2) Romney just didn’t move the numbers as much as he needs to. Let’s face it: Mitt Romney is way behind in the polls. Not so much the national polls where’s he’s 3-4 points behind on average, but in the swing state polls, where he trails by significant margins in most of the states he needs to win–particularly Ohio, but also Wisconsin, Virginia, Nevada and many others. There are precious few paths to the Presidency for Romney that allow him to lose Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada and Virginia, and he’s down by at least five points or more in each of those states.

And there are precious few undecided voters left out there–by many accounts less than five percent of the electorate. Which means that Mitt Romney needs to win almost all of the undecideds, particularly in these swing states, for him to have a chance. Even if Romney picks up 2/3 of the undecideds who claim he won the debate tonight–a doubtful figure, given that it almost certainly includes some of the President’s natural supporters deflated at his more passive performance–it’s still not enough.

3) Romney’s lies will come back to haunt him. Part of the reason the President may have been caught off guard was Mitt Romney’s hard tack to the center, essentially throwing the modern conservative movement under the bus and pretending that his last year’s worth of campaign statements never happened. On every issue from Romneycare to cutting taxes for the rich, the challenger basically pretended that he was the Mitt Romney of 2002 again.

It may be that Romney was trying to shake the etch-a-sketch starting tonight, or it may be that he was trying to win over the undecided voter who pays little attention to news except to watch one or two debates. If the latter, then it won’t matter to him how much fact checkers rip apart his statements (for instance, the L.A. Times has three separate sub-headlines reading “Romney repeats false healthcare claims“, “Nonpartisan reports challenges Romney tax claims“, and “Romney’s charge on Medicare misleading“).

But the Obama campaign may see fit in the coming weeks to put Romney’s sudden pretenses at being a moderate tonight alongside his actual speeches and statements from no more than a few days ago. That will have the effect of reinforcing Romney’s image as an ambitious used car salesman who will say anything to get elected. And that will hurt him as voters go to the polls.

In the end, Mitt Romney sacrificed his long-term standing in order to try to fool undecided voters in the immediacy and win a news cycle. And he still didn’t win enough voters in the news cycle to make even that short-term strategy successful.

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