IT'S A DOG'S LIFE

IT'S A DOG'S LIFE

Mitt Romney is now the presumptive Republican nominee for President and after tomorrow's round of GOP primaries, that result will be all but official.  He has managed to be the last man standing in a field notorious for its extremism on the one hand and transparent lunacy on the other.  In doing so, however, he has raised the political flip-flop to an art form.

He was pro-choice as the GOP Governor of Massachusetts from 2004 to 2007 and now says he is not.

He was for gay rights when he ran the Bay state and now claims to have gotten right-wing religion on that issue as well. 

He more or less invented the individual mandate as a practical alternative to near universal health care in Massachusetts, a feat justly praised when he accomplished it in the middle of the last decade as his erstwhile opponent Ted Kennedy stood proudly by his side while he signed the bill . . .

But now he pledges to repeal the mandate at the federal level, and -- if the Supreme Court follows the hints all those conservative justices tossed out at the recent oral argument on the ostensible un- Constitutionality of Obamacare's mandate -- acquiesce in its repeal at any state level as well.

In sum, a few years ago Mitt Romney was a moderate Republican Governor, the trifecta of a throwback to (1) his Dad (himself a moderate Governor of Michigan in the '60s), (2) the well traveled road of GOP moderation in Massachusetts itself (see Governor Weld, Senator Brooke, Governor Peabody, etc.), and (3) the historic moderation and at times progressivism of the national GOP (see Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Percy, Clifford Case, Jacob Javits; indeed, even Nixon, the author of the EPA and OSHA as President from 1968 to 1974).  Today, however, Romney professes to be the right wing's standard bearer, all the moderation and progress of his former self thrown by the wayside in his single-minded obsession to become the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee.

Romney, of course, will now try to tack to the center.  His campaign manager all but told us that a few weeks ago,  comparing the primary and general election campaigns to separate Etch-A-Sketches where the latter can simply erase the former.  So as we head to the general election, we can expect Romney to tone down his love affair with the right wing and -- at least in the swing states -- dust off his former Massachusetts moderate self for a re-appearance this fall.

This presents an enormous problem for the American electorate.  

For Romney, more than any recent candidate for President of the United States, has basically bet his electability on which of his various selves the voters think will show up on January 20, 2013 if he is actually elected.  

And we now have to decide.

The simplest answer -- indeed, the one which most base Democrats will immediately embrace -- is that Romney cannot be trusted.  One who careens with equal ease from utterly incommensurable positions is playing the voter for the fool.  Case closed.

But for the independents out there, the case will not be closed.  They will give Romney the chance to make his case.  In fact, with polls tightening as the Republican primary season closes and the general election effectively upon us, they already are.

So the question remains . . . 

Which Romney will show up on January 20?

Fortunately, the answer is simple.

It'll be the guy who strapped his dog Seamus to the hood of a car years ago as he undertook a day long journey to his vacation spot while the poor beast hysterically unleashed its innards.

The dog-on-the-roof story has been around for awhile and from time to time rears its (from Romney's viewpoint) ugly head.  Gail Collins of the New York Times  has, shall we say, doggedly kept the story alive in her own twice weekly column.  And now a number of independent groups have decided to run with it (full disclosure:  as the owner of a rescue dog, a deaf and blind shih-tzu, I am the Chair of one of them; for any interested, the web site is www.mittismean.org).  The response of the Romney campaign, the RNC, and Romney supporters as a whole has been derisive.  They basically maneuver from a smug "Are you serious" -- using the large issues this election will decide to blow off what  amounted to either animal cruelty or weird insensitivity  -- to an incredible "The dog really liked the trip."  The latter, of course,  is unbelievable on its face and turns out to be false in fact.  

Because the first thing poor Seamus did when Mitt finally arrived at his destination was . . . 

Run away.

Which is exactly what we should do this November.

Because the dog on the roof story is not a joke.  In fact, it tells us a lot more about Mitt than his tenure as a businessman, a Massachusetts Governor, or a Presidential candidate.  Yes, the guy comes off as a robotic automaton, and yes, in those years as a leverage buy out specialist at Bain & Co., he destroyed more American jobs than he created, and yes, he has flip-flopped his way to the GOP nomination -- and air brushed his gubernatorial term along the way -- with the grandeur of a political Houdini who thinks we won't notice.

But the real problem is this.

Mitt doesn't care.

He is an ends-justifies-the means kinda guy.  Once he decides to go somewhere, he does not for a moment worry about how he'll get there, who he'll run over, who will fall by the wayside, what things will be like when he finally arrives, or what promises he made on the way.  He has demonstrated this with abandon in his Presidential campaign.

But it has always been there . . .

And always will . . .

And if Seamus could talk . . .

He'd tell you so.

RADICAL

RADICAL

Time to go radical.

Reasonable is not working.

If I hear one more politician or ersatz journalist rail about the need to find bi-partisan common ground in the sweet spot of a centrism where immediate deficit reduction and job growth live in some sort of economic harmony, I am going to get sick.  It isn't going to happen.

It can't. 

Over the last thirty years, conservative orthodoxy has simply pulled too much demand out the economy.  That is what happens when (1) wages stagnate,  the result of unions collapsing and globalized wage arbitrage taking over, and (2) bankers get unregulated free rein to peddle "products" that put consumers in long term hock, which is what they accomplished when everyone was allowed  to use their home as a credit card.  Once those same bankers turned mortgages into cash for speculators via the now infamous mortgage backed securities, the con was complete.   The ensuing real estate bubble created the impression that there was a free lunch (in the form of ever rising asset values).

And then the bubble burst.

Today, consumers are still over leveraged (thanks to that explosion of private debt over the last decade), but banks can't lend enough (given the shakiness of their balance sheets -- where all those mortgage backed securities are still being held at par -- and the perceived need to adhere to credit standards that were ignored in the run up to 2008).  So private spending is still weak.

The March jobs report was a big disappointment.  The private sector produced a mere 120,000 jobs that month.  Wall Street (and just about everyone else) expected the number to be in the 200,000 range and it wasn't even close.  The recovery from 2008 continues unabated.  But its pace is anemic and uncertain.  In this world, conservatives continue to talk about immediate deficit reduction, business confidence and fears of inflation, certain that dealing with the first and the second is necessary to curb the third and produce jobs.  

All of this, however, is pure economic bunk.  

As Paul Krugman has continually pointed out to anyone willing to listen, we have not begun to put a dent in the job losses that came in the wake of 2008.  The percentage of "prime age" workers who are actually employed -- a real number, unlike the unemployment rate, which is distorted by failing to count those who stop looking -- went down by about five points during the collapse and has gone up by less than one in the "recovery."   At the same time,  our nominally low inflation rate  (about 2% overall, even with the recent gas price hike) shows no sign of precipitously rising any time in the near future.  Businesses are not hiring and producing because there is not enough demand (unemployed debtors don't have a lot of walking around money) , not because they are worried about the tax and regulatory environment.

The near term solution to all of this was a sufficient stimulus and some inflation.  The conservatives, however, made the former impossible, and the chattering classes (including a lot of professional economists who should know better) have scuttled the latter.  What we have, therefore, and have had for some time now, is an economic crisis that our political culture seems powerless to confront and solve.  

The problem here is not a lack of ideas.  We have known how to pull ourselves out of depressions and severe recessions for at least 80 years.  You do it by getting the government to increase consumer demand given that the private sector can't or won't.  This typically involves some form of government spending -- either on infrastructure (which creates both an immediate bump up in demand and also helps with long term productivity), welfare spending (food, housing, etc., which just increases demand), or targeted tax cuts (which increase demand so long as they are properly targeted to those who will spend the money rather than bank it).

None of this, however, is politically possible now.  A deficit which could create problems in the medium and long term is being used to eliminate any rational economic response to demand problems in the short term.  It is also being used to eliminate any policies which could devalue private debt, which is what inflation and/or various forms of foreclosure relief would do.  And the folks manning the barricades as deficit hawks circa 2012 are the same people who brought you the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and the two unpaid for wars of the last ten years, which cumulatively turned the Clinton surplus into Bush's sea of red ink. 

But hypocrisy has no cost in American politics. 

So it is practiced with abandon. 

I am a believer in incremental progress.  I understand that American federalism is very slow.  It is far easier to stop something than it is to pass anything.  And that was the Founders' collective intent.  Over our two hundred plus years of history, therefore, progressives have always had to fight a two-steps-forward-three-steps-back war against reactionaries and the status quo.  Their opponents changed -- from slaveholders to industrialists to stock speculators to sexists.  But the process rarely changed.

Except when it did.

Because, from time to time, progressives have abandoned the marble temples of incremental American federalism and . . . 

Gone radical.  

They've raised hell, hit the streets, jumped to the front of the bus, crossed the bridge, burned the draft cards, or camped out on the Mall.  Unable to change the conversation from within, they altered it from without.  Unwilling to defer to authority, they defied it.  And underestimated by a smug establishment, they created a new one.

That is where we are today.  The system isn't working.  Twenty years ago, in his Presidential campaign, former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas made a point of admonishing unreconstructed New Dealers and trade unionists to stop bashing business.  And the Democrats heard him and stopped.  But now the other side has turned bashing labor . . . or women . . . or gays . . . into a cottage industry.  And that has to be stopped too.   Progressives have to hit the streets.  The kids have to vote like they did in 2008.  The Wall Street occupiers have to return to Zuccotti Park.  The conversation has to change.  

The people who change it will not be the bankers, hedge funders, or politicians checking out the "internals" on their polls.  Because we have to stop talking just about margin . . . or return on investment . . . or individual responsibility . . . or the swing voter.  And begin talking about redistribution . . . and economic fairness . . . and justice.   

We need to rediscover what it means to be a citizen in a democratic republic.

Rather than just a consumer in a capitalist economy.

We need to go radical.