ROMNEY AGONISTES

ROMNEY AGONISTES

I am from New York. 

But last week went to Virginia.  

And was finally in a state where there actually is a Presidential campaign.

Here is New York, safely blue, we are besieged with information from the under-ticket.  No Presidential candidate need apply.  I know, for example, that one of my Congressional candidates,  Sean Patrick Maloney (he always uses the Patrick, though I doubt anyone questions his ethnicity), will preserve Medicare and the right of women to make their own health care choices, and that his opponent will not.  I then find out, however, that his opponent, Rep. Nan Hayworth, a so-called Tea Partier elected in  2010, will do the same, or so she says.  I know she was for the Ryan budget, and so have more than some doubts about this.  But all her fellow-travelers in the GOP are singing from the same hymnal, doing their best to convince us that they are . . .

What they clearly are not.

Mitt Romney, of course, has written the book on this.  

And added yet another chapter to it in his debate this week with President Obama.  

The topic this time was foreign policy, but the same feigning Mitt showed up.  In Denver, the candidate for the $5 trillion tax cut, $2 trillion defense increase, and junking of Obamacare, became the candidate without the cut or the increase and with a ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions and an extension of parental coverage for kids.  In Boca Raton, the policies changed but the approach did not.  This time,   pace his recent and not so recent past, there was no red-line on Iran's nukes and certainly no war, no disagreement on the 2014 deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, and no disagreement on Pakistan.

In his previous life, Romney had so berated Obama for weakness on Iran that, given the actual strength of the sanctions regime (it is literally putting the Persians on rations), his policy alternative had  to be viewed as favoring a military strike.  He had also joined John McCain in committing to not violate Pakistan' sovereignty without their permission (which would have made the bin Laden raid either impossible or ineffective).  In Boca Raton, however,  the candidate (and party) that ignored Osama bin Laden for ten years was forced to praise the President who didn't,  and sanctions-shaped diplomacy replaced neo-con sabre rattling as the policy of choice on Iran.

Even when he went off topic, Romney stayed in character.   

When the debate strayed into auto company bailout territory, laser-focused as both candiates were on the bailout's positive impact in Ohio, mutating Mitt claimed he was actually for federal assistance to the auto companies in 2009.  This was a lie, or as they say these days, a post-truth.    In fact,  at the time the bailout was proposed, Romney said the auto companies should be forced to re-organize in a bankruptcy court.  Unfortunately for Mitt, this is neither a place debtors go in search of federal assistance nor one where that assistance is given out.

In truth, the only real contrast the entire night was the one that blew up in Romney's face.  

Earnestly -- but inaccurately -- asserting that his proposed defense increase was merely opposition to the sequestration that may occur later this year (the latter of which, by the way, neither he nor Obama can stop without Congressional action, which the GOP is now holding hostage so as to preserve Bush II's tax cuts for the wealthy ), Romney claimed our Navy was woefully under-equipped, noting that it had fewer ships today than in 1916.  Obama's rejoinder was that the force structure had been set, in consultation with the Joint Chiefs and all three branches of the military, based on strategic concerns and that, in the line that broke records on Twitter, "We also have fewer horses and bayonets."

At which point, Romney just went back to agreeing with Obama, looking "Presidential", and trying to make sure he didn't turn off the the last two undecided voters in Ohio . . .  or Colorado . . .  or New Hampshire.  

Which was his only purpose from the outset.

Now, to be frank, there is a Shakespearean "doth protest too much" quality to all of us who lambast Mitt Romney for tacking to the center in a general election.  They all do it and Romney is not the first, nor will he be the last,  to raise political posturing to an art form.  In fact, if that were all his 11th hour, 59th minute metamorphosis amounted to, it might very well say much that was negative about his character (as in "I'll do or say anything to get elected"), while at the same time saying a lot that was positive about his brain (as in "OK, I am really not that crazy and won't drive us off the cliff by actually implementing all that right wing stuff").

Here,  however, is the problem.

If elected, Romney  won't be able  to govern from the center, even if he has undergone a sort of road to Damascus conversion to common sense.  

He won't be able to do this because no President governs alone and Romney's party has no one in it who can implement a set of centrist policies.  On the one hand, as Grover Norquist -- he of the "no tax" pledge in exchange for beaucoup de campaign contributions -- has made clear, the only job a Republican President has is "to sign [the] stuff" the right wing sends him.  On the other, if you look for potential Republican cabinet secretaries who could implement a non-right wing agenda on either domestic or foreign policy, there are none.

To a man (and woman), the current crop of GOP governors has preached at the altar of tax and spending cuts, eliminating public sector unions, opposing cap and trade to bring down carbon emissions, and favoring oil and natural gas over renewables.  Put simply,  a set of Republican centrists to run HUD . . . or the Departments of Energy . . .  or Health and Human Services . . . or Labor . . . or the EPA is  unavailable.  And on foreign policy the situation is even worse.  Romney's Secretary of State in waiting is John Bolton, and he is not against either going to war on Iran or out-sourcing the job to Israel.  

So what Romney believes, or more importantly whether he believes anything, may not even matter.  

If he is, as he pretended to be for virtually all of this and the last Presidential campaign, a once moderate governor now become a garden variety Republican right winger, the voters will reject him.  But if he is the vague but discernible moderate whose mantle he donned in all three presidential debates, a guy who answers "Never left ya" to Bill Clinton's "Where ya been these last few years, I missed ya", the elites in his own party will reject them.  

The reality is that Romney sought and obtained the nomination of the most conservative and extreme Republican Party in the modern era.  It is layered with true believers running through Congress, the well-funded right-wing think tanks and corporate lobbyists, and the right-wing media of Ailes's Fox and Murdock's NY Post.  Its policies would take us back to the economics of the 19th century and the foreign policies of the first decade of this one.  Romney could not have won the nomination without them.  That was his problem.  Ours is that he has no one to govern with . . .

Other than them.

THE MULTI-TASK CANDIDATE

THE MULTI-TASK CANDIDATE

I am a little late to the party this week.  I could not really choose between baseball and the Vice-Presidential debate last Thursday.  So I had half an eye on each.

These days, that is called multi-tasking.

A lot of folks are very proud of their ability to multi-task, and they let you know it.  When you complain about requests to do more than two things at once, the multi-taskers upbraid the singularly focused.  Multi-taskers are vigorous, dynamic, engaged.  Those who resist are lazy, static, uninvolved.   Multi-taskers create the impression they are problem solvers, always willing to add a puzzle to their plate and have at it.  Their opposites avoid those opportunities, compulsing a single trial or tribulation to death.  Multi-taskers embrace the speed of light pace of our post-quantum world.  They count in nano-seconds. 

Everyone else is ponderous.

Lots of businessmen are constantly multi-tasking.  And even when they aren't doing it, their demeanor evokes it.  Just take a look at Jack Welch, GE's former CEO.  In the space of about five minutes last week, he was for Romney, against the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their lower-than-8% unemployment rate, for the notion that this constituted a conspiracy, and then against the notion he was "blaming" anyone for the conspiracy he pretended to unearth.

All at the same time.

A multi-tasking home run, if you will.

Mitt Romney is a multi-tasker.  All those pundits lambasting Mitt for his lack of specifics, or for his herculean ability to completely change his mind in the space of, if not a moment, then most certainly an election cycle, are missing the point of the man.  It's not hypocrisy, or the greasy wheel of a false politics that promises what can't be delivered.  It's not even the  re-awakening of an erstwhile moderate self (though Bill Clinton did have a lot of fun with that possibility). It's none of that.  What it is . . . is . . .

Multi-tasking run amok.

Multi-taskers never get criticized for this, but their real problem is that they cannot focus.  They have very short attention spans.  My guess is that, were you to assemble a statistically valid sample of multi-taskers, a group diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder would not be far behind.  It, of course, flies in the face of conventional wisdom to suggest that CEO Mitt or any of his successful confreres can't focus; that is ostensibly what they are paid to do, and the better they do it, the more they make.  But run that reel a second time and look carefully.  The Mitts of the world are not the ones doing the focus-ing.  That work is being done by the brilliant back office guys and gals.  Mitt is only the "closer", the guy they send in to seal the deal at the end. 

Probably can do a bunch of them in a morning.

After all the non-multi-taskers have crunched the numbers and spent their all-nighters in the weeds.

Multi-taskers, however, make bad presidents.  Bush II was a multi-tasker.  You could tell given his love affair with his schedule.  He ran the White House by the clock and was never late for the next  meeting, regardless of what went on in the last one.  That's discipline.  The discipline of a multi-tasker . . . 

Who multi-tasked us to a near disaster.  

Clinton -- contrary to appearances -- was not a multi-tasker.  It's not that Clinton did not get a whole host of things done in a single day.  He did.  But he took his time on each.  He is even like that when he campaigns.   Just ask his scheduler.  If Clinton meets you -- and I have met him at least three times --  he focuses and the watch stops.  By the time you're done, he'll remember your name two years later.

A multi-tasker can promise a 20% across the board tax cut that doesn't add up.  Or a $2 trillion defense increase that doesn't increase the deficit.  Or a ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions that doesn't require a mandate or raise premium prices.  He (or she) can do this because, by the time he has to confront the contradictions he has embraced, indeed even while confronting them,    he  is on to the next . . . problem.

While some aide is cleaning up the mess.

That's multi-tasking.  Doing two or more things at once . . .

Poorly.

 

ROMNEY REPEALS ROMNEY

ROMNEY REPEALS  ROMNEY

Both Presidential candidates went to the University of Denver on Wednesday night .  President Obama went there to debate Mitt Romney.  Romney went there to debate . . .

Himself.

All the pundits pronounced Romney the so-called winner.  

The liberals on MSNBC were apoplectic at the President.  Ed Schultz repeatedly bemoaned the President's failure to come at the former Massachusetts governor, whether on the issue of privatizing Social Security (which Romney has been for), or cutting Medicare (which Obama did not really do and which, in any case, Romney in fact does), or obstruction (which the GOP practices with Prussian-like discipline in Congress), or just being preternaturally out of touch (as evidenced by Romney's 47%-are-dependent claim).  Chris Matthews said there was no "Bobby Kennedy" in the President (Matthews remarked that before the first JFK-Nixon debate in 1960, Bobby told Jack to "kick him in the balls").  And Rachel Maddow noted the total absence, in a debate billed as one on "domestic policy",  of conversation on a host of domestic issues where Romney is weak -- abortion, reproductive rights, environmental policy.

While, of course, the left was exasperated, the right was ecstatic.  For the first time in the fall campaign, they thought they had something to crow about.  And crow they did, in typical fashion.  Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was his old obnoxious self, pronouncing Romney's ostensible victory "devastating" on the one hand, while insulting the President as "befuddled," "surprised" and "looking for a teleprompter" on the other.  Having gone ad hominem (the Mayor calls it "ad personam" but needs to brush up on his Catholic school Latin) on the President, there was rich hypocrisy in the air when he blasted Chris Hayes for asking whether money from Homeland Security to Giuliani himself amounted to exactly the sort of "feeding the [government} beast" for which Giuliani derides the administration.  Rudy denied he ever had any Homeland Security contracts, but that was mere wordsmithing.  His firm, Giuliani Partners, has made millions advising firms that themselves have millions in Homeland Security contracts. 

In any case, the right thinks Romney triumphed, the left thinks Obama fell asleep.

And they're both wrong.

Here's why. 

When all the dust settles, the long term story on Wednesday's debate will be Romney's debate with himself.  On issue after issue, the former Governor was an act of re-invention of self in progress.  If Obama seemed befuddled, I can't blame him.  I was a little bit befuddled too -- at, yes, the sheer audacity of Romney's effort at self-redefinition, but mostly at the unrecognizable story now being told.  On issue after issue, a new Romney emerged.  When his campaign manager told us last spring that general elections present a veritable "etch-a-sketch" moment to wipe the old slate clean, he was not kidding.

Because for Romney, this was an "etch-a-sketch" debate.

On taxes, Romney has for the past eighteen months told us that he plans to cut federal income taxes across the board by 20%.  By simple math (Bill Clinton's vaunted "arithmetic" in Charlotte last month), that adds up to (1) a $5 trillion dollar cut that (2) disproportionately favors the wealthy.  Last night, however, Romney said, "I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut."  He then followed up with "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people."  Both statements are false.  The first is flagrantly so.  A 20% "across the board" cut in rates equals $5 trillion no matter who is counting, but all the GOP nominee was banking on is the notion that those 40 million watching the debate would not realize Wednesday's Romney was at total war with Tuesday's.  

As to the second, it is likely to turn out to be a gross distortion as well.   While the "share" paid by high-incomers could stay the same even if cuts are passed, Romney has told us his tax cut will be "revenue neutral" and will not increase the deficit.  The money to fund the cut, therefore, has to come from either spending cuts, closing loopholes or eliminating deductions. He hasn't identified loopholes and his base will oppose eliminating the big money deductions (in the day leading up to the debate, he floated the idea of capping deductions at a certain amount, but last night he just invited us to "pick any number" for that amount; apparently he hasn't polled yet on which number will be least offensive to voters).  So, really, spending cuts it is, and since he wants to raise defense spending and swears he won't cut Medicare, the reductions have to come from everywhere else -- food stamps, public housing, student loans, education, basic research, etc.  

Most  of which  does not benefit the rich.

But all of which benefits the middle and lower middle classes, and the poor.

And all of which, taken together, would still not be sufficient to fund his tax cut without increasing the deficit.

Reinvention continued on health care.  For the entire campaign, we have been told that a President Romney will repeal Obamacare "on day one."  He routinely decries the individual mandate (even though he passed one in Massachusetts).  Now he says that he will not repeal all of Obamacare, promising to retain those parts of the law which forbid insurance companies from excluding applicants based on  pre-existing conditions and allow parents to continue to cover kids until the kids turn twenty-six.  At the same time, he (1) proposes to allow the states to create their own plans to bring the costs of health care down, (2) guarantees Medicare will not change for those fifty-five and older, and (3) wants to voucherize Medicare for those who are younger.

These are circles that cannot be squared.  

If, in fact, Romney repeals the individual mandate while retaining the ban on exclusions for pre-existing conditions and the parental coverage extension, insurance premiums will sky-rocket and no one will be able to afford policies.  The only reason companies can accept the ban and the extension is that the mandate guarantees them millions of additional customers, many of whom will be perfectly healthy and thus premium paying non-users.  That, moreover, is the essence of insurance.  You create a pool and then spread the risk.  The larger the pool, the larger the spread, the lower the individual cost.  

The notion that states on their own can manage this problem is sheer nonsense.  While they've been trying for the last thirty years, costs have routinely gone up at rates exceeding inflation and insurance companies have monopolized the individual state markets.  In fact, the only state that succeeded in stemming this tide is Romney's Massachusetts, which became the template for Obamacare.  In the debate, Romney claimed he wanted to defer to the states, which he praised as "laboratories of democracy, " using a phrase he borrowed from the Progressives of yore.   He should know, however, that when those state "labs" come up with experiments that work, there's nothing wrong with  allowing the rest of us in on the success.

Then there was Romney on Medicare.  He falsely accused the President, yet again, of cutting $716 billion from the program (even though his own program does exactly that).  What Obama in fact did, however, was cut payments to insurance companies -- the middle men -- so that the money could be re-directed to benefits.  Next up was the claim that Romney would preserve the program for seniors (or those close) who now have it, but voucherize it for the young, the latter of which is a bad idea he hopes the young won't notice.  Romney glibly asserted that his privatized Medicare world would be one where citizens could choose Medicare over private insurance, but he knows that sort of competition will be entirely illusory.  Instead, the well off will use their vouchers to supplement their own payments and buy high end insurance, while the less well off will be left with Medicare.  In the meantime, nothing will have been done to lower costs, so the pressure on Medicare to cut benefits will be ineluctable and cut they will.

Some might even call it rationing.

By economic class.

On tax cuts and health care, Romney and his seconds think he etch-a-sketched his way to a good night.  On others as well , they think he did the same.  In the wake of the 2008 financial implosion that effectively caused a lesser Depression, Romney has been for repealing Dodd-Frank, the rather anemic re-regulation passed to combat the worst excesses that led to our recent rendez-vous with 1929.  Last night, he changed that to repeal and replace.  With what?   Who knows.  He falsely claimed that Dodd-Frank preserves "too big to fail",  but it doesn't.  It simply recognizes that certain large institutions are "systemically" critical and therefore have to both satisfy larger capital requirements and come up with appropriate plans (so-called "living wills" in the parlance of the regulators) to reorganize or liquidate in the event of any future imminent collapse.  Contra Mitt, Obama  was not endorsing "too big to fail."  He was simply following "too important to be ignored."

Which would have been nice to see in the last President, or the current GOP nominee, when all hell was breaking loose in 2007 and 2008.

So that was the debate.  

Romney v. Romney, really.  

One of them had to lose.